The Deep Zone

ONE

SOME NIGHTS, WHEN THE WINDS OF SPRING RISE UP OUT OF Virginia, they peel fog from the Potomac and drape it over the branches of dead trees trapped in the river’s black mud banks. Streamers pull free and flow into the mews of Foggy Bottom and the cobblestoned alleys of Old Georgetown, float over the chockablock townhouses, and finally wrap pale, wet shrouds around war-fortune mansions.

A black Navigator pushed through this fog, driving west on O Street until it left behind the homes of the merely rich and entered a realm of oceanic wealth. The SUV turned onto a drive of gravel the size and color of corn kernels and walled on both sides by Madagascar barberry nine feet tall and bristling with three-inch thorns.

In the backseat, the passenger stared at the red spikes and thought about crucifixion.

The Navigator passed through a series of remote-controlled gates, the last of which was hung with warning signs:

It stopped in front of a mansion of rust-colored brick and white marble. Flowers like red fists filled white boxes hung beneath windows of wavy, distorted glass. Boxwoods carved into strange shapes lined the circular receiving area in front.

The driver got out, a tall man blacker than his black suit, lips like overripe plums, skin smooth as polished onyx. He wore sunglasses, despite the hour. His accent was thickly African: “Sair. We hair.”

The passenger stepped onto glistening cobblestones. A warm and moist night, fog coiling around his legs, air fragrant with boxwood and the coppery bouquet of those red flowers. The Navigator dissolved in mist. He climbed granite steps, their edges rounded off by a century and a half of wear, to a columned, curving porch that reminded him of the foredeck of an old sailing ship. He was reaching for the knocker, a massive brass cross hung upside down, when the door swung inward.

Standing before him was a tall woman wearing a blouse of lime-green silk and a white linen Dior skirt cut above the knee. She had shoulder-length red hair and green eyes and she was so beautiful that looking at her was like gazing at the sun: impossible to regard for more than seconds.

“Good evening. I am Erika. Thank you so much for coming.” Lilting, musical voice, traces of Ukraine or Belarus. She extended a hand, cool, long-fingered. She smelled faintly of gardenias.

“My pleasure.”

“Mr. Adelheid has been expecting you. Please.”

He followed her down a long, dusky hallway floored with Italian marble, smooth and white as ancient ice. In pools of yellow light on the burgundy-painted walls hung what he took for reproductions, a van Gogh, a Renoir. Then he stopped.

“Excuse me. Is that a real Picasso?”

Erika glanced over her shoulder. “Of course. They are all originals.”

She brought him to a pair of doors from an old century, some European castle or palace, pushed one open, touched his arm, and left.

A man came forward holding a heavy crystal tumbler. He wore tan gabardine slacks pressed to a knife-edged crease, a black double-breasted blazer, a French blue shirt open at the collar, and a pale rose ascot. The visitor had never actually met someone who wore an ascot and had to keep himself from staring. The deep, resonant voice on the recordings had led him to expect someone huge and powerful, but this man was as slim as Fred Astaire and moved with the same languid grace.

A man who never hurried, he thought. Not once in his life.

For all his elegance, there was nothing effeminate about the man. Quite the opposite; he moved through space like a perfectly balanced blade.

“Bernard Adelheid.” Ahdelheight. Accent here, too. Faint, indistinct. Swiss? Dutch? “We are so glad you are here. You must be extremely busy.”

“You know government. Too much work, too few people. Always.”

“Always.” A handshake, mild, dry, brief. “What do you drink?”

“What are you having there?”

“Fifty-year-old Laphroaig, neat.” He held his crystal tumbler aloft. The room was high-ceilinged and dimly lit and the golden whiskey seemed to collect light from the tall white candles in brass wall sconces. There was a fireplace the two of them could have walked into. He could not see into the farthest corners of the room.

A hundred dollars a glass if it’s a cent, he thought. “I’ll have the same, then.”

Mr. Adelheid poured him four fingers from a Baccarat decanter on a sideboard of medieval proportions. They clinked glasses and the host spoke in German:

“Mögest du alle Tage deines Lebens leben!”

They drank, and Mr. Adelheid said, “A very old toast. Eleventh or twelfth century. From the Teutonic Order, some say. Or perhaps der Bruderschaft St. Christoph. It goes, ‘May you live all the days of your life.’”

“Good advice. Even if easier said than done.”

“Not if one has the means.”

He raised his own tumbler, swirled the liquor, inhaled its spirit, a scent like lightning-struck oak.

“Remarkable, isn’t it?”

“Beyond words.”

“As some things are.”

“Including this house.” He could feel the halls and countless dark rooms winding around him like the passages and chambers of a great cave, dark space with weight, pressing, a sense of threat. “Is this yours?”

“Is my name on the deed? No. It belongs to a family of my acquaintance.”

“It looks very old.”

“Built in 1854 by Uriah Sadler. A shipowner.”

“What kinds of ships did he own?”

Mr. Adelheid smiled. “Fast ships with big holds and hard crews. He was a slave trader.”

He thought of the black man who had let him out of the car. “Your own crew. Impressive.”

“You mean Adou. Yes. A Ugandan. Mostly civilized.”

He saw chopped limbs, brained babies, changed the subject. “The place is huge.”

“And bigger than what you can see. Captain Sadler had unusual tastes even for a slaver. The cellar beneath is vast. Rooms with granite walls and drains. To contain the screams and flush the blood, I’ve been told.”

“A horrible time.” He could think of nothing else to say.

Mr. Adelheid sipped, watched him. “I hope you will stay to dine with me.”

“I had planned on it.”

“Wonderful. Please, come and sit.”

They took places at a table set for four. Crystal and silver sparkled on white linen. He had never been good at small talk, but Mr. Adelheid was extraordinary, so after a while he felt as though he were in one of those foreign films where people speak endlessly across fabulous tables, every utterance freighted with wit and irony. They talked about Washington’s execrable weather, the visitor’s workload, AfPak, one subject flowing smoothly into the next. Mr. Adelheid made a story about hunting wild boar in Russia sound like an elegant fable.

A waiter appeared, removed his empty tumbler, replaced it with a full one.

“Shall we begin with some Strangford Lough oysters?” Mr. Adelheid smiled, then looked abashed. “I’m so sorry. You do like oysters, don’t you?”

The few raw oysters he had ever eaten had made him think of toilet bowls. “Absolutely,” he said.

The waiter set down silver plates with the slick, pink things in iridescent shells on crushed ice. Mr. Adelheid tipped one to his lips, slurped, savored. Steeling himself, the guest did the same. A taste like very dry champagne with a hint of salt wind. He smiled, agreeably startled.

“Incredible, no? I could eat them every day.” Mr. Adelheid lifted another. “This morning they were in the Irish Sea.”

They concentrated on the oysters. He had always known that certain people lived this way: palatial homes on estates that sprawled like counties, enormous yachts, exquisite women, the food and drink of royalty. Relishing ecstasies every day about which he could only fantasize.

He had never known how such lives were made. Now he might learn.

When he had finished eating the oysters, Mr. Adelheid pushed his plate aside, dabbed his lips.

“Let us speak now. You have a very important job at BARDA. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Created in 2006 by President George W. Bush to counter biowarfare threats and responsible for, among other initiatives, Project BioShield.”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating work, I imagine. Would you care to tell me about it?”

He paused while the waiter set down new plates. Velvety, chocolate-colored filets in a scarlet sauce. “Medallions of Black Forest venison with Madeira and black truffles,” Mr. Adelheid said. Then wine, poured into crystal goblets from a bottle with a label like parchment. He had drunk wine, of course, even, on a few occasions, in very expensive restaurants. Now he understood that he had never tasted great wine.

How many other great things had evaded him in this life? He suddenly felt regret so intense it made his eyes glisten. Too quickly, he brought the wine glass to his mouth, spilling a few drops onto the immaculate tablecloth, embarrassing himself. His moist eyes, the soiled linen—he felt thick and stupid in the presence of this polished man.

“I do microbiology. MDRBs.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry. Multiple-drug-resistant bacteria.”

“Is it like in the movies? You know, exotic germs, that kind of thing?”

A little flare inside him. “Calling them germs is like calling diamonds rocks. They are miracles of evolution. And beautiful. Think of a spiral nebula on the head of a pin. Every color in the universe.”

“You speak of them as friends.”

“We get along well. I respect them. And admire their good qualities.”

“Which are?”

“Astonishing evolutionary speed, for one.”

“Do you work in space suits?”

“Sometimes. Those in BSL-4.”

“What does that mean, exactly, ‘BSL-4’?”

“Biosafety Level Four. The highest security level. Positive-pressure environments. Chemturion protective suits. Respirators. Disinfectant showers and ultraviolet germicidal lights. Double-door air locks. Unbreakable labware.”

Mr. Adelheid nodded, touched his right ear with the tips of two fingers. The door swung open and Erika walked in. Even moving, she seemed to be in repose. Everything about her was … perfect. Her legs, body, face, eyes—not one dissonant curve or angle.

“Good evening, Erika. Would you care for a drink? Some champagne, perhaps?”

“No thank you, sir.”

She sat, crossed her magnificent legs, and something caught in his chest.

“Erika, you have met our friend.” No name offered, none asked for.

“Enchantée.”

“Would you like to spend time with our friend?”

“I would love to.” A voice like chimes, exultant, as if it were the greatest opportunity life had offered.

He almost dropped his fork, fumbled, felt like a fool.

“Would you find that agreeable?” Mr. Adelheid smiled at him.

He hesitated, thoroughly unsure how to respond.

“We could have Christina come in. Or Gisele.”

“No, no.” He reddened. “No. I mean, yes, of course, I would find that agreeable.”

“And Erika, would you like to accommodate our friend’s wishes?”

“Oh, yes.” She placed her fingertips on the back of his hand, four small, cool circles on his hot skin. There was something about the way she moved, slowly, dreamily, as though underwater. “There is a villa in the Mediterranean, on an island all its own, with a waterfall in the bedroom. Floors of pink marble, walls of glass.” She flicked her eyes at Mr. Adelheid.

He smiled. “No rules we do not make, the only laws those of nature.”

His thoughts twirled, huge black eyes, white fog, shining oysters, golden whiskey, scarlet wine, a turquoise sea scattered with flakes of light. This woman’s scent, heavier now, gardenia sweet. He closed his eyes, breathed.

I could use some air.

“Thank you, Erika.” She rose and turned to their guest.

“I hope to see you again.”

“And I… yes, me, too.”

He watched her leave, moving through space as though without weight.

“To the victors go the spoils.” Mr. Adelheid raised his glass again.

“God in heaven.” He drank, eyes closed.

“Would you like to learn more?”

“That’s why I came.”

Mr. Adelheid nodded. “Fine. But let us enjoy this good food first. We should never rush our pleasures.”

“Live our lives.”

“Indeed.” Mr. Adelheid did something in the air with his right hand, some ancient benediction, and picked up his knife. They ate in an island of light in the great shadowed room. With a silver knife he cut the venison and forked to his mouth pieces dripping with sauce. They ate and did not speak, the only sounds in the room those of their chewing and breathing and the insistent buzzing of one invisible fly.

TWO

THE LIGHT IN THE ROOM RIPPLED, CANDLE FLAMES DANCING with currents of air. He ate, drank wine, so overwashed with pleasures he forgot for long moments who and where he was.

After a time, with half of his venison uneaten, Mr. Adelheid laid down his silver, dabbed his lips. His fingers were slim and very long, tendrils with shining tips.

To leave food like that. His own plate had been clean for some minutes.

“Well. We would be very grateful for your help.”

“Leave BARDA and come to work for you?” He did not know who Mr. Adelheid worked for. But surely it would be made clear. Or would it?

“No. Not leave BARDA.”

“A mole, then.” Crude. He regretted it immediately, blushed.

The fly, buzzing again. An expression passed across Mr. Adelheid’s face, like clouds scudding over the moon. “An observer.”

“What would you want me to observe?”

“Most antibiotics today are derived from one original source, is that not true?”

“Yes. Actinomycetales. Discovered in 1940 by Selman Waksman. He got the Nobel for that work.”

“But germs are winning the battle. So I have heard.”

“Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from bacterial infections we can no longer treat. In the U.S. alone. Other places, the numbers are… appalling.”

“Hundreds of thousands of reported deaths. The true total is much higher, isn’t it?”

“Of course. Did renal failure or hospital-acquired infection kill Mr. Jones? One checkmark in a different box on a report. An easy choice for dirty hospitals. Which most are.”

“And your facility—BARDA—is trying to produce an entirely new family of antibiotics.”

“Among other projects. But yes, that is one main thrust of the work.”

Mr. Adelheid smoothed his ascot. How old was the man? The visitor could not say with any certainty. Forty or sixty. His skin was smooth, eyes bright, movements lithe. But there was something ancient about him, Sphinx-like, an inscrutable repose.

“Consider this. The new currency of power is information,” Mr. Adelheid said.

“Really?” The Laphroaig and the wine were making him bolder. “So given the choice between a ton of gold and a terabyte of information, you’d take the terabyte?”

“On the surface, an easy choice. A ton of gold today is worth $45 million. No paltry sum. But: what if you have golden information? Do you have any idea how much money has been made from Dr. Waksman’s antibiotics?”

“Billions, I would guess.”

“Trillions.”

“Don’t you have politicians who can help you?”

“Of course we have politicians. And others. But no one like you.”

“So what do you need, exactly?”

“Exactly? At this very moment? Nothing. But there will come a time. Very soon, we think.”

Keeping his eyes on the table, he said, “You want me to be a spy.”

Mr. Adelheid made a sound as if clearing something unpleasant from his throat. “Spies make death. Our wish is not to take lives but to save them.”

“For a profit.”

“Of course for a profit.” His tone suggested that any alternative would be irrational, like living without breathing. “What are millions of human lives worth?”

“Priceless.”

Mr. Adelheid regarded him in silence for a moment. “You know of Reinhold Messner? The great mountaineer?”

“I know he climbed Mount Everest solo.”

“And without oxygen. In Europe, a god. Messner said, ‘From such places you do not return unchanged.’ ”

“I don’t climb.”

“Mountains are not the only realms from which we may not return unchanged.”

Mr. Adelheid reached into his blazer, produced a slip of green paper the size of a playing card. He slid it to the middle of the table. A deposit ticket from Grand Cayman National Bank for Fifty thousand and 00/100 dollars, payable not to a name but to an eleven-digit alphanumeric sequence.

“An appreciation for the pleasure of your company this evening. You need only the PIN. Which I will give you.”

“For doing what?”

“For joining me tonight.”

“Fifty thousand dollars for a few hours?”

“Of course.”

It was dizzying, but another question had to be asked. “How much for doing the… observing you mentioned?”

Mr. Adelheid named a figure that made his heart jump. For a moment the room blurred and sang like a plucked string. He put his hand on the table, a few inches away from the green slip. Thoughts skittered in his head.

So this is how it feels. He watched as his hand, possessed, slid toward the green paper.

“I urge you to think carefully.” Mr. Adelheid’s voice made a strange echo in the chamber. Or was it the whiskey and wine? “This threshold, like Messner’s realm, is one you cannot recross. Be certain.”

It came out, quick and harsh, as though he had been waiting most of his life to tell someone. “I have a doctorate from a good university. Nineteen years of government service. I make eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and seventy-six dollars a year. I have been passed over for promotion three times. I do not want to die having had only this life.”

Mr. Adelheid regarded him thoughtfully. “And there was that unfortunate business with your wife. Forgive me: former wife.”

So he knows. Of course. He would know everything. He bit off each word: “Yes. The ‘unfortunate incident.’ ”

It had been nine years, but like a gangrenous wound, this one would never heal; in fact, like such a wound, it seemed to grow deeper and more foul as time passed. Even Mr. Adelheid’s veiled reference made his rage flare. And not just rage. A hot and breathless shame for the losses—and for being one who’d lost the great things.

Mr. Adelheid said, “It was unfortunate. She strayed. And yet—”

“—and yet her lawyers took everything. The house, our savings, the antiques… our dogs.”

“The Airedales, yes. And it goes on.”

“Oh, yes. On and on. Do you know, after she left me, I had to move into a condominium”—he said the word as though it were an obscenity—“in one of those subdivisions with hundreds of them, all identical, lined up. It could be Bulgaria. Every morning I drive from there to BARDA, walk the same two hundred and nineteen steps to the laboratory, and at the end of each day I walk the other way. Week after month after year. That does something to a man.” He paused for breath, aware that he had not spoken to anyone like this for longer than he could remember.

“I am so sorry.” There was something like sympathy in Mr. Adelheid’s voice.

The guest’s fingertips lifted, extended, dropped down on the edge of the deposit slip. His chest felt like thin blown glass. A red spot, wine he had spilled, stained the linen beside his hand.

He put the ticket into his shirt pocket.

Mr. Adelheid lifted his wine glass for a toast. “Welcome.”

“Thank you.” They drank.

As his latest swallow surged through him, he felt empowered. “You know who I work for. Am I permitted to ask who you work for? My guess would be BioChem.” The largest pharmaceutical, headquartered in Zurich, operating in every developed country and many undeveloped ones.

“No. Nor any other pharmaceutical concern. Are you familiar with the Dutch East India Company?”

“I know that it raped Asian countries for centuries.”

“No. It was the world’s first multinational corporation, and the first to issue stock. A government unto itself, with global reach.”

“The Dutch East India Company became corrupt and collapsed.”

“As do all empires.”

“What I meant was, you can’t be working for the Dutch East India Company.”

“A descendant.”

The waiter brought balloon snifters of cognac. Mr. Adelheid sniffed, drank, smiled with closed eyes, a bliss like lovemaking.

“I wasn’t aware it spawned any.”

“A little knowledge can be dangerous. Too much can be fatal. I can tell you that the object of our present discussion has no headquarters, no corporate papers, no employees. Only members and friends.”

“Are you talking about some kind of international cabal? Freemasons, Templars, that kind of thing?”

A barked laugh. “God, no.” Mr. Adelheid paused, considered. “Think of an enormous, invisible web. If you touch it even lightly the whole web shivers.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“I could give you many. Cancer is to our era as infectious disease was to the last. One in three persons alive will contract cancer of some kind.”

“Yes.”

“There is a cancer vaccine, though.”

“What?”

“Oh yes. Almost nine years now.”

“Can’t be. The government would not allow that.”

Mr. Adelheid laughed and the candle flames shivered.

“The government has nothing to do with it. The government houses the lowest common denominators of our species.”

“Why?” He already knew the answer, but the question asked itself. Mr. Adelheid frowned.

“Healthy people do not buy pharmaceuticals.”

A fellow worker, killed by brain cancer, had taken a medicine called Orbitrex. Thirteen hundred dollars for six small blue pills. Every week. For months.

He knew that what his host was describing was wrong, but in this moment he could believe that it did not compare to the greater wrongs life had inflicted upon him. And there still existed in him a deep, silent place where all things rang one of two ways. Mr. Adelheid’s words rang true. Really, he had always known, or at least suspected. But how could you keep going and not bury that deeper still? There was no other way.

“So we near the end of our evening together.” Mr. Adelheid stood and came to him and they clasped hands again. This time, Mr. Adelheid locked eyes and held his hand and forearm in an astonishing grip, like a tourniquet tightening.

“So pleased. More than you can know. Before you depart, I would like to show you the house. A historic place, truly fascinating. More cognac?”

“No. But thank you.”

“Very well.” They walked into the hallway, as dimly lit as the huge room they had just left, and then toward the rear of the house. At the end of that hall they turned right, into another. The passages and chambers were draped in black crepe shadows. Mr. Adelheid held a cigar that trailed blue smoke. When did he light that? The visitor could not remember. Mr. Adelheid drew on the cigar and its tip flared red. They walked and walked, along halls and through rooms, passing many closed doors. At last through one whose hinges squealed and down a narrow, creaking stairway, poorly lit, into darkness from which rose odors of damp earth and stone and decay.

He followed the red coal of Mr. Adelheid’s cigar as if it were a beacon, down one dirt-floored passageway after another, turning corner after corner, and for the first time began to feel afraid. The surface underfoot was rough, and he had to take care not to stumble. Every so often he stooped beneath massive beams.

Mr. Adelheid stopped by a door five feet high, thick, rough-hewn. He could not stop thinking of spiders and snakes. Cellars always did that to him, and this cellar… Mr. Adelheid pushed the heavy door open and ducked into the room. He followed. There were no electric lights. Candles burned in rusting sconces. Massive iron rings, affixed to walls and ceiling, scabbed with brown rust. The smell in the room was stomach-turning, heavy with filth and mold.

The stone floor sloped down toward a central drain. Mr. Adelheid walked to the drain, drew on his cigar. The tip flared red. There was the buzzing of the fly again, louder now, closer to him. For an instant he thought that he might have felt the brush of tiny wings on his lip, but he saw nothing in the gloom. He could not take his eyes off the drain.

“In rooms like this, Captain Sadler took his pleasure. An underground passage led to the Potomac. Still does. Bodies were carted down and consigned to the river, which carried them to the sea.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“You know why. This is a very serious thing, this new realm you now inhabit. Caveat venditor.”

Let the seller beware.

Mr. Adelheid glanced around the chamber one last time. “Remarkable place, isn’t it? The kind from which you do not emerge unchanged. Nor ever forget.”

Upstairs again, they walked to the front door, which began to open as they approached.

“One more thing you should know.” Mr. Adelheid drew on his cigar, peered through blue smoke. “You will have company at BARDA.”

“You mean other… observers?”

“Yes.”

“Doing the same thing I am?”

Mr. Adelheid tilted his head, exhaled smoke. “Enough to know that they are there.”

Observing, he thought. Observing me. Is that what he means?

He needed to know something. “How do you find… people like me?”

Mr. Adelheid drew a red line in the air with his glowing cigar tip. “You find us.”

“But I never did anything. You reached out to me first.”

“We have done this for a very long time, and we are exceedingly patient,” Mr. Adelheid said. “Not unlike you scientists. A few unguarded words. An indiscreet letter. Financial transactions of a certain kind. These and other things.”

The word came to him: “Signals.”

“Indeed. And the strongest signals are those of distress.”

Like a moth caught in a web, he thought.

“Adou will drive you back. You will hear from me. For now, go and live the days of your life.” Mr. Adelheid disappeared into the mansion.

The guest stepped out onto the porch and almost bumped into Adou. The place had been ablaze with light when he arrived, but now the porch was as dark as the deck of a slaver on a black Atlantic night.

He could just discern Adou’s outline, shadow against dark. Then a lighter clicked and Adou touched fire to the tip of his cigarette. He had taken off the sunglasses. One empty, ragged eye socket flared red in the yellow flame.

“Come.” It did not sound like a request this time. Adou moved off, as sure-footed as a midnight cat. He came behind, stumbling into the darkness.

THREE

THE BULLET HIT FATHER WYMAN BEFORE HE HEARD THE AK-47 report. No surprise, that. Haji’s AK rounds traveled a mile in two seconds, way ahead of their sound. You never heard the one with your name on it. So to Father Wyman’s way of thinking, only fools and ground pounders ducked and flinched in firefights. When they were Oscar Mike, he stood tall in his up-armored Humvee turret, head on a swivel, hands on his fifty-cal’s oak, cigar-shaped grips, thumbs on the butterfly trigger.

Father Wyman was not a priest. He was a heartland patriot less than three years out of high school, but he loved to read his Bible and to hold prayer meetings for the other troopers, so that was what the men in Viper Company at Combat Outpost (COP) Terok had taken to calling him. Wyman’s was not a foxhole conversion. He’d inherited from his father and mother an unshakable belief in the Book’s literal truth. It was not an ancient tome of mystic parable, but practical wisdom by which they lived their lives, day by day. They trusted it as farmers trusted their land and wealthy people their money. They read it more often than newspapers. They had no faith in soiled politicians and godless scientists. Anyone with eyes to see and a mortal soul knew that the Bible had survived centuries of sin and dark horror to bring them light. Why would God have saved it for them otherwise? When they touched their Bible, opened it, read from it, its power was as real as wind and fire.

Wyman was as big as he was devout, six-three and 210 pounds. His machine gun was bolted to a wheeled carriage that rolled around the circular track of his Humvee mount, so he could easily man the gun one-handed. He had seen the muzzle flash two hundred meters out. The haji fired—a good shot, considering the AK-47’s notorious inaccuracy—and dropped down behind a washing machine–sized boulder, no doubt thinking himself safe.

Too bad for you, Mr. Haji. Viper Company was equipped with “Badass”—that was what they called the new boomerang anti-sniper detection system (BADS), which used passive acoustic detection and computer-signal processing to locate a shooter with pinpoint accuracy. Badass’s developers, like those who created audible aircraft-crew cockpit warnings, knew that the male brain responded best to a female voice. So, while he was still running on adrenaline, in his earpiece Father Wyman heard a sultry young woman say, “Target bearing one-nine-one. Range two-zero-seven.”

When he turned in that general direction, a bright red dot appeared on a particular boulder, two football fields distant, in the image in his monocular eyepiece. The red dot remained on that boulder no matter which way Father Wyman turned his head. A yellow dot representing his aim point, with computer-calculated elevation and windage adjustments, also appeared in the eyepiece. When the yellow dot merged with the red, a green dot appeared and the woman’s voice breathed, “Target acquired,” followed by a soft, continuous tone.

Father Wyman loved the fifty-cal because it was more light cannon than machine gun. It could reach out and touch at two hundred meters, no problem. Wyman depressed the trigger twice with his good thumb and the gun bucked. He felt the detonation of each round, the blasts milliseconds apart.

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. That one blew apart the boulder.

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. That one blew apart the sniper.

“Scratch one haj…” Wyman said, but then the adrenaline ran out. White-faced, with his shoulder squirting blood, Wyman dropped out of the turret and collapsed on the Humvee’s floor.

DeAengelo “Angel” Washington was a Crip from South-Central, but he had been born again, was just as Bible-struck as Wyman, and the two had grown as close as brothers. Angel had been riding shotgun with his SAW—squad automatic weapon—up front. He jumped back, pulled Wyman’s body armor off, stuck a tampon in the tubular wound, pushed three ampicillin caps into Wyman’s mouth, and gave him water.

“That hurt, dog?” Angel was holding Wyman in his arms. Wyman was big, but Angel was built like Mike Tyson.

“Not too much.” Smiling, voice soft, dreamy. “I get him?”

“You got the mother. Dog meat now.”

Angel turned and screamed “MEDEVAC!” at the Humvee driver, Corporal Dorr, a quiet young soldier from Arkansas, who was staring back at them, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “CALL MEDEVAC, DOORKNOB, YOU DUMB CRACKER, ’FORE I SHOVE MY KA-BAR THROUGH YOUR EARHOLE!”

Wyman and Washington were paratroopers of Viper Company, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment. COP Terok sat high on one side of a steep, twelve-hundred-meter mountain overlooking Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The Korengal River flowed through the valley’s green floor, throwing silver loops around yellow fields of wheat, disappearing into the blue distance. Early in the mornings, white clouds curled around the black mountain’s flanks and hid the valley floor completely, and at such times Wyman and Washington agreed it was so lovely and peaceful that it could have been heaven. But this was perishable heaven, and by 0800 hours sun seared away those clouds, uncovering a valley of death laced with infiltration routes for veteran fighters from Pakistan.

Just after noon, orderlies rolled Wyman on a gurney into Terok’s medical unit. He looked pale and spooky-eyed, but he was conscious and holding a black pocket Bible on his chest with his good hand.

“Hello, Sergeant,” said Major Lenora Stilwell, MD. She was trim and pretty, with short brown hair and kind eyes and freckles from the Florida sun. Her Tampa practice was orthopedic surgery; her Terok practice was gunshot wounds and blast trauma. Not so different, she told the people back home—surgery was surgery. But that wasn’t true. It was very different.

In a way, Wyman was lucky, getting to a real doctor so quickly—and he had, incongruously, the Taliban to thank. Because Terok did such a good job of sending hajis to meet their seventy-two virgins, the Taliban had targeted it for annihilation. Then, of course, the Army had decreed that Terok would never fall. Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh redux. More, bigger, fiercer Taliban attacks, worse atrocities. More troopers, arty, gunships, Bradleys, drones. Taliban and Terok, two scorpions in a jar, stinging each other slowly to death.

The one benefit of the Army’s commitment was a combat support hospital (CSH). Most COPs had plywood cubicles with extra sandbags where medics stanched bleeding, doped up the bad cases, and waited for Chinooks. Terok had an actual little hospital with two surgical theaters, two ten-bed wards, twelve nurses, and three doctors. One was Lenora Stilwell.

“Hello, ma’am.”

Good strong voice, Stilwell noted.

“Are you hit anyplace other than the shoulder?”

“Don’t think so, ma’am.” The kid was grinning now. Amazing.

Nurses scissored off his uniform, started IV ampicillin, removed the tampon, irrigated the wound.

“What’s your name, Sergeant?”

“Daniel, ma’am. Wyman.” That stopped her. Stilwell’s son was named Danny.

“Do I hear a little Kansas there?”

“Yes, ma’am. Delacor, Kansas. You, ma’am?”

“Tampa.” Stilwell probed, assessed. His jaw muscles clenched. “Ketamine twenty cc’s IV,” Stilwell instructed a nurse without looking. “Through and through. You are a lucky young man, Daniel.”

“Ma’am?”

“Bullet missed bone. A couple centimeters lower and you’re minus an arm. I’ll clean you up, start you on antibiotics, get a drain in place.”

“So then I can go back?”

“Back where?”

“With the squad. Angel and all.”

“You’ll be here awhile. Maybe Kabul.”

“No way. Really, ma’am?” Kabul was the home of CENMEDFAC, the big military hospital. He looked more troubled by that possibility than by the wound.

“Way. We want you to have that arm for a long time. Hey, it’s not so bad here, Daniel. We have some vivacious nurses.”

“Ma’am?”

“Hot.”

“Oh. Well.” The grin returned. “Thass good. Thank you, ma’am.”

He yawned, the ketamine working. Without his combat gear, Wyman’s wide blue eyes and towhead buzz cut made him look more like the high-schooler he had so recently been than the expert killer he was now. That had been the hardest thing for Stilwell. Not the gore and carnage—those she saw in operating theaters every week. But the youth. Kids too young to drink whiskey in a bar damaged in every imaginable way and some that were simply unimaginable until seen. That was the hardest part.

Her Danny was fifteen and talking about enlisting already. In a few years, a doctor in some godforsaken corner of the world might be ministering to him. Her eyes felt hot. She put a hand on the exam table to steady herself.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” She had thought him asleep, but he had been watching, concerned, up on his good elbow now. He was worried about her. Stilwell patted his healthy shoulder, eased him down.

“I’m fine, Daniel. I was just thinking…”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing. You go to sleep, Sergeant.”

Wyman rubbed his eyes like a little kid and dropped right off.

The next morning Angel visited. Wyman’s bed was one of ten in a long, rectangular room. Only two others were occupied: by a corporal who had dropped an eighty-pound mortar tube on his foot and a Humvee driver with back injuries from an IED.

The quiet struck Angel. Outside there were whapping helicopters and thrumming generators and outgoing arty thumping like the drums of God. Never quiet. Here, it felt weird. Dead. Angel stopped at the blue curtain drawn around Wyman’s bed.

“Wy. You awake? How you doin’, dog?”

“All good, Angie. Come on in here.”

Angel thought Wyman looked normal, a little drowsy maybe. His shoulder was bandaged and he had needles in both arms.

“What they sayin’, Wy?”

“No biggie. Hit muscle, missed bone.”

“How long you be in here?”

“Doc said couple of days.” Wyman was not going to mention Kabul. Bad juju.

“Ain’t the same without you on the five-oh, Wy.”

“Roger that. Anything happening?”

“Same ol’ same ol’.”

Wyman yawned. “I think they been giving me a little dope.” Crooked frown. “Don’t like th’ stuff.”

Angel chuckled. “Oh my. Back in the ’hood, dog… No, forget that. Look, Wy, I’m gonna go, let you sleep. You need anything?”

“All good, Angie. Thank you f’ comin’ over here.” Eyelids drooping.

“You send for me, you be needin’ something, hear?”

“I will. See you later.”

“Roger that.” Angel started to leave. Then he turned back and put a hand on Wyman’s good shoulder. “You sure you don’t need nothin’?”

“Needa get back on the fifty.” Wyman tapped Angel’s hand with his fist.

“All right. I’m gone.”

“Hey, know what? The nurses in here are vivacious, man.”

“They what?”

“Hot.” Wyman laughed, a groggy chuckle. Angel, not sure what the joke was, laughed, too. If it made Wyman laugh, it was a good thing.

Lenora Stilwell returned that evening, expecting to find Wyman better. Instead, he was feverish, BP and pulse elevated, skin sallow.

“Ma’am, I think I’m coming down with flu or something.” He said this without being asked.

“What are you feeling?”

“Hot. Sore throat. My body hurts.”

“How about the shoulder?”

“Hurts, ma’am.” Paratroopers’ pain thresholds were off the charts. If this one was telling her it hurt, it hurt.

She removed the dressing and a yellow reek rose from his wound. Between tribiotic ointment and IV ampicillin, Wyman should have been infection-free, but Stilwell was seeing puffy, whitish flesh flecked with dark spots, bacterial colonies oozing pus like rancid butter.

Stilwell cleaned and irrigated Wyman’s wound, applied more tribiotic, replaced the drain, and put on a fresh dressing.

“There’s some infection, Daniel. I’m putting you on a different antibiotic, tigecycline. And something for the pain.”

This time he did not argue. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“All right. Rest, drink a lot. I’ll come by later tonight.”

She did not return then, nor most of the next day, nor even the next. The same action that kept the doctors and nurses up to their elbows in blood for almost four days kept Angel and his squadmates in the field as well. On the first day, Viper and Tango companies surprised insurgent units moving in daylight, a rare thing but, as it turned out, no accident. The firefight quickly became a complex encounter that unfolded according to a careful plan—the insurgents’ plan.

They did not hit and run, as usual. In fact, they made contact and then engaged even more aggressively, taking a page from the old North Vietnamese Army tactic of “hold them by their belts.” This clutch of death negated the Americans’ artillery and most of their tactical air support. The initial action became a running battle that the insurgents seemed to have no interest in breaking off. Going to ground during the days, they were resupplied with fresh fighters and matériel each night and renewed their attacks on multiple fronts under cover of darkness. The KIAs and MIAs mounted. After the first day, medevac helicopters flooded Terok with an endless red stream of wounded troopers.

Angel wasn’t a casualty, but once he was finally back at Terok, he fell asleep in his gear and didn’t wake for ten hours. It was late afternoon, six days after Father Wyman’s wounding, when he walked back into the ward—which, though still white, was no longer silent. The ward was filled with damaged troopers. Extra beds had been rolled in. Instead of the silence that had greeted him before, Angel now heard a sound that made him think of chanting by drugged monks, an endless chorus of moans and cries from soldiers in morphine-proof pain. The mobile unit’s flimsy floor and walls seemed to vibrate with the sound.

There was also a funny smell he had not noticed last time, a sour tang like meat gone bad. He stopped in front of Wyman’s drawn blue curtain.

“Wy. Hey, Wy. You up, dog?”

No answer.

“Wy?”

Angel eased the curtain aside and stepped in. Father Wyman was lying on his back. Blood soaked the sheet covering him and had gathered in dark red pools on the floor. Wyman’s breathing sounded like steel wool being dragged over a washboard. Angel stepped forward and pulled the sheet back, smearing both hands with Wyman’s blood. Silver dollar-sized patches of Wyman’s skin were missing, exposing red, raw muscle. His left cheek looked like it had been chewed by animals, the white eyeball floating in blood. He smelled like a slaughterhouse.

“MEDIC! MEDIC! I need a medic here!” Angel kept screaming until a slim, white-coated doctor with short brown hair and a blue flock of following nurses pushed him out. Somebody whipped the curtain closed. Other soldiers—the few who could manage—were sitting up in their beds, staring, looking at each other: What’s going on, man? Angel, terrified as he had never been in battle, backed out of the ward wide-eyed and open-mouthed, tears of fear and horror streaming down his face as he left a trail of wet, red bootprints going the wrong way.

FOUR

LEAP DAY IN NORTHERN FLORIDA, AND A TALL YOUNG WOMAN with short hair was opening the Deep Enough Dive Shop for business. She was thinking that the peculiar month’s extra day was going to muck up the bookkeeping, but that was getting ahead of things. She wore khaki shorts, a red Hawaiian-print shirt with the tail out, and New Balance running shoes. She was tanned the shade of tea, her naturally blond hair sun-bleached almost pure white. She had square shoulders and runner’s legs. Her forearms were corded with muscle and veins from climbing, her hands scarred and as rough as a laborer’s. Her nose had a slight crook in it.

A squat man with a bodybuilder’s physique walked in while she was arranging a new display of Liquivision dive computers behind the counter. He wore tight red swim trunks and a yellow tank top and his biceps and calves were like loaves of bread. The man’s way of walking made his Teva sandals slap the floor like flyswatters smacking a tabletop. “I need a guide to dive the Boneyard.” The man’s voice was high and boyish for one so armor-plated. Tourist sunburn, last night’s margaritas on his breath. “I heard this shop had the best guides.”

“Are you cave certified?”

He showed a TDI C-card that affirmed that Thomas Brewster of White Plains, New York, was indeed full-cave certified. “Also deep diving, decompression, and trimix. You want to see those cards, too?”

“No. There’s no deco or trimix on the Boneyard dive.”

She was thinking that if were up to her, she might not take the guy—impatient, puffing out tequila fumes. But Mary Stilwell, sleeping one off herself, had given Hallie this job after the fiasco in D.C. Mary was her best friend, but not much of a businesswoman. An inch-high stack of unpaid bills sat on the card-table desk in the back office. No time to turn away customers.

“I’ve done the Doria twice. Empress of Ireland, too. Plus Nowhere Caverns and Bottom of Hell.” Brewster said this in a flat voice, but his face shone with pride.

“What did you think of the Doria?” Hallie had always wanted to do that dive herself.

“Tell you the truth, I was freaking terrified the whole time.” With that, she liked him a little better. “Two-knot current, ten-foot viz. Risk my life for some crockery? But now I get to say I did it.”

She smiled. “There is that.”

“So what’s this gonna cost me today?”

“It’s three hundred dollars for one guided dive, five-fifty for two. We’d do the Boneyard first, maybe Sink to Perdition in the afternoon.”

She waited, knowing that the guys over at Divers Down charged two hundred for the one-dive package.

He glanced around the shop. “Who’s the guide?”

“I’m the guide.”

“Can I see your C-card?”

“Sure.” She reached under the counter. “I’m NAUI, TDI, and NOAA certified, bonded, licensed by the state of Florida.”

“Hey. Just kidding. Can we go now?”

“Like, right now?”

“Yes.”

The patience of tourists, she thought. The options: stay at the shop for four hours or until whenever Mary came in, sell some fins and masks to tourons who would call them “flippers” and “goggles,” or guide Thomas Brewster and make three hundred, maybe five-fifty, for the shop. Bird in the hand.

“Let’s go.”

The shop was two miles north of Ginnie Springs Park on State Road 47. With Brewster following in his black Escalade, she drove the shop’s red F-150, windows cranked down. It was very hot already, but she loved the moist air, sweet with gardenia and hibiscus and orange blossom and, when the wind was right, with the Gulf’s saline tang. Welcome change from the diesel and sewer reek of D.C.

They parked in a dirt lot and carried their gear to a wooden dive platform by the water. Nearby, families who could not afford trips to the Gulf or the Atlantic were picnicking on fried chicken, potato salad, burgers, and Budweiser, drawn to the shade of the park’s big live oaks and the cool springs’ turquoise water.

Assembling her rig, Hallie looked over Brewster’s gear. Double-steel 100-cubic-foot tanks, Halcyon buoyancy compensator with Hogarthian rig, dual Atomic regulators, redundant NiTek dive computers, fifteen-hundred-dollar Halcyon cave lights, OMS fins with steel-spring heel straps. Maybe I was wrong about the guy, she thought. It was a new thing with her, judging quickly and harshly, and, she understood, a direct result of the mess in Washington. It had soured her as surely as a cup of vinegar spilled into a bottle of good wine. Easier to get it in than to take it out, was the problem. Hanging around with Mary, who had been an Apache pilot in Iraq and was scarred in body and soul, was not the best cure.

She explained the dive plan: one-third of their air going in, one-third coming out, one-third in reserve.

“Sure, sure,” Brewster said. “SOP.”

“There is no SOP in cave diving, Mr. Brewster. And especially not in the Boneyard.”

He nodded, stared back, after a while looked away. “Right.”

“I lead going in, you lead coming out. The line is clearly visible all the way to the Boneyard Chamber. Viz should be good but not great, thirty feet or so. We’ve had rain.”

“Any obstacles?”

“One restriction. Tight, but no doffing gear required.”

“I’m gonna shoot some video.” He held up a Nikonos digital video recorder with integrated lights that, she knew, retailed for about five thousand dollars.

“Gas allowing, not a problem.”

“So what actually happened in there?”

They had been donning gear as they talked and were almost ready to enter.

“Two good divers drowned in 1998.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Why are the bodies still there?”

“Recovering would have been too dangerous. Plus both had wills stating that if they died in a cave, they didn’t want people risking their lives to bring them out. And, so I heard, the state thought it would help prevent repeats.”

“Law of unintended consequences kicked in, though, am I right?”

“What do you mean?”

“The place is famous now. Like the Doria. Everybody wants to dive here, go see the skeletons.”

He had that much right. They ran through predive routines, made giant-stride entries, hovered at ten feet to perform bubble checks and S-drills. She vented gas from her own Halcyon and settled to thirty feet, the water sweetly cool after the heat above. The cave mouth was a dark hole in a pale underwater wall. Inside, beyond the entrance, she shone her light on the white guideline on the cave floor. Brewster pointed at his eyes, gave the circled thumb and forefinger: Okay.

Hallie tied off line from her main reel to the permanent guideline. She pointed in the direction of their intended travel, watched him acknowledge by repeating the gesture, then took them down toward the Boneyard, spooling out line as she went.

The first quarter mile was like the intestinal tract of a giant worm, ten feet in diameter, bending and twisting, striated limestone walls flaring green and white and black in their dive lights. The bottom was tan silt, fine as flour; the particles would remain suspended in the water for an hour if disturbed. The only sounds were the hissing and burbling of their regulators.

Hallie loved being down here. She had been in her first cave at six, just a touristic operation, nothing special, Luray Caverns in Virginia. But that day something went click deep inside, and she had loved going into caves ever since. Sometimes she thought of herself as a troglodyte, one of those creatures, perfectly adapted to the cave environment, that died if brought out into the light. She wouldn’t die and she loved light, but in caves a certain ancient calm took her over. Very different on the surface, where type A genetics drove her like wind behind a sail.

They each had two lights on their yellow helmets and bigger primary lights affixed to the backs of their right hands with surgical tube straps. Every twenty feet, Hallie looked back between her thighs at Brewster. He was moving well but breathing hard, blowing out a steady stream of bubbles.

Four hundred yards in and forty-five feet deep, they came to the restriction. The ceiling dropped and the walls closed in, leaving an opening the size of a refrigerator door. It was called the Jaws of Death, something Hallie had neglected to mention to Brewster. She slipped through and hovered, waiting. His head and shoulders made it, but his big chest and double tanks did not. Instead of relaxing and emptying his lungs, Brewster started throwing his hips and legs around and yanking on rocks with his hands—bad mistake. Before he silted them out, she grabbed both his wrists, gave them a hard jerk, made eye contact, held up an index finger: Stop.

He did.

She signaled again, pushing down slowly with both hands: Relax.

He nodded, backed off, tried again, and worked his way through. They reached the Boneyard Chamber in ten minutes. The main cave passage continued to the left, and the short feeder passage to the chamber dropped steeply fifteen feet down to their right. Hallie went in first. The chamber was shaped like a bell, thirty feet in diameter at the bottom, no bigger in diameter at the top than an oil barrel.

Brewster came in and settled down toward the skeletons, whose bones flashed white in his bright dive lights. They were on their backs, where the weight of their tanks had pulled them. As their flesh had decayed, their mask straps had loosened and the masks had fallen away. The eye sockets gaped, black holes in the white faces.

Brewster videotaped ten feet from the skeletons for thirty seconds. He sank lower until he hung a foot above them, the sharp light making the skulls shine like silver. Then he jerked and spun, dropping his Nikonos. Inside the mask his eyes looked wide and wild.

Hallie had seen it before. The skeletons had spoken: We died in here. You can, too. He had begun to imagine their deaths, the panicked breathing, thickening silt, the flailing search for the exit in zero visibility. Thrashing and gasping, tangling bodies, panic feeding panic, air coming harder as tanks emptied, frantic last gasps, thoughts flickering out, and then… nothing.

She knew that Brewster’s deep, reptilian urge for self-preservation would be screaming, Out! He charged, tried to shove her out of the way. Hallie grabbed his harness and spun him around and smacked him hard on the side of the head, just beneath his helmet, with the steel handle of her primary light. Not many things could cut through panic, but good old-fashioned pain was one. She gave him a shake, held up one finger: Stop! For a moment she wasn’t sure, but then he got control of himself. She looked at his pressure gauge: 1,300 pounds. They had started with 3,000. He should have signaled for the turnaround long ago.

We’re going back, she signaled with a twirling forefinger. Now.

He nodded.

She went first, frog-kicking and pulling herself along with handholds to get more speed. She had dropped her primary reel in the Boneyard. No time to be rewinding line now. Brewster was breathing so hard it looked like his regulator was free-flowing. At the Jaws of Death she slipped through. Brewster got stuck again, flailing and scrabbling. Hallie hung back, knowing that panicked divers not infrequently took their buddies with them. Two minutes passed before he finally muscled through.

And then, suddenly, his bubbles stopped. He grabbed his secondary regulator. No bubbles. She could not believe he had breathed both tanks dry that fast, but here they were. She gave him her primary regulator on its seven-foot hose. His eyes were bulging as though someone were pumping air into his skull.

Breathing from her own secondary, which she carried on a shock-cord necklace, she started out again, careful not to pull the regulator away from him. Fifty yards from the cave mouth, it began to feel as though she were sucking air through thick cotton. She took several long, deep breaths, locked the last down in her chest. Brewster spit his reg out and tried to grab her. He breathed in water, convulsed, went limp. She grabbed his harness and began swimming backward, towing him on her chest.

Hallie was a national-class free diver who could remain motionless at forty feet for almost five minutes. But hauling Brewster, who weighed more than two hundred pounds, and whose double-steel tanks weighed another hundred, she was burning through oxygen. No choice. She swam on toward the circle of light. It was small and too far away and she knew they were not going to make it. Hypoxia hit, burning in her chest, her peripheral vision contracting, thoughts slowing. She felt sluggish and numb. Very soon her blood CO₂ level would trip an autonomic breathing reflex, and that would drown her.

Nothing to do about that.

Swim.

She kept kicking hard, pulling on rocks with her free hand, her vision darkening to points of light like the last two shimmering stars in a black sky. Beyond thought, beyond feeling, her body kept working, hauling, pulling. Then she was falling away from the dimming stars, away, and then she was gone.

She did not remember bringing herself and Brewster through the cave entrance. When she came to, she was swimming toward the platform, Brewster in tow.

“Need help here!”

People ran down from the picnic area, hauled Brewster onto the platform.

Gasping, she puked into the water. “Put him on his left side!” Hallie said. She dumped her own gear in five seconds, climbed onto the platform. Brewster’s face was gray, lips and fingernails blue. She cleared his airway, rolled him onto his back, performed fifteen chest compressions, started CPR. Sour fluid came out of him. She breathed, pumped, breathed, pumped. She heard someone calling 911.

“I thank he’s a goner.” A woman in the crowd, nearly hysterical.

This was country; EMTs would take time. Hallie began to feel light-headed, her arms burning. She kept at it, breaths and compressions, over and over and over. It could have been ten minutes or an hour, she wasn’t sure. Was that a siren? She couldn’t be sure about that, either. Foul liquid kept leaking out of Brewster’s throat and nose, but she ignored it. A child in the crowd was screaming. A man bent over her, red-faced, fearful.

“Lady, I don’t think he’s gonna—”

Just then Brewster bucked, convulsed, spewed vomit. She rolled him over onto one side as two EMTs in blue jumpsuits shoved through the crowd.

“What happened?” The EMTs, sweating like laborers from their run in the heat, were breaking out oxygen and defib kits.

Hallie and Brewster knew exactly what had happened. But she said, “Equipment failure. His regs silted up.”

Hallie leaned close, as if to give Brewster a light kiss, and whispered into his ear. “You were lucky.”

Vomit-smeared, eyes stretched wide, he grabbed her hand. Squeezed, pulled her back down. Whispered, “Thank you.”

“No worries.”

She patted his shoulder and left.

FIVE

MARY WAS THERE, RED-EYED, GREEN-FACED, CLUTCHING A mug of black coffee in one hand and a Marlboro in the other when Hallie came in. The paramedics had taken Brewster to their local hospital, worried that he might have aspirated vomit and possibly collapsed a lung as well. Hallie had sat with two state troopers, giving information they needed for their report. It was almost two by the time she made it back to the shop.

“I got a call. What the hell happened?”

Mary’s voice was deeper and rougher than cigarettes could make it. Insurgents in Iraq had done that, bringing her Apache down with a Stinger and filling her lungs with fire.

Hallie told her.

“Jesus Christ. How are you?”

“Trashed. Can I take the afternoon?”

“For sure. Those guys want a word with you, though.”

Mary nodded toward the back of the shop, and Hallie saw the red, wrinkled mat of scar tissue on the left side of her friend’s face, a sight she would never get used to. Then she let her eyes travel farther.

She hadn’t noticed the two men by the racks of masks and fins. Gray business suits, white shirts, and ties with wide, diagonal stripes. One tie was red and gold, the other blue and green. Both had little American flag pins in the right lapels of their suit jackets, short, razor-cut hair, and cheeks shaved so close they gleamed.

“I don’t think they’re looking to dive.” Mary blew smoke toward the men.

Hallie approached them. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Agent Fortier,” said the one with the red-and-gold tie. “This is my partner, Agent Whittle. We’re with the Department of Homeland Security.”

They showed ID folders with gold badges and photos.

Hallie flushed, folded her arms across her chest, pissed off just by the sight of them. “Let me guess. You’re worried we’re diving with terrorists, sowing mines in harbors or some such bullshit. Am I right?”

Fortier’s mouth dropped open. Apparently people usually showed more respect. While Whittle coughed and examined a wet suit’s price tag, Fortier maintained a neutral expression. “Can we speak privately, Dr. Leland?”

That surprised her. Hallie wasn’t called “doctor” around here, where people just knew her as a dive instructor and guide.

“Nope,” she said. “Let’s do this tomorrow. Rough day at the office, gentlemen.” She started to walk away, already tasting an ice-cold Corona, then stopped. “In fact, let’s not do this at all. You want to see me, I have a lawyer you can talk to first.” It wasn’t true, but she thought it might get them off her back.

“Dr. Leland,” Fortier’s eyes flicked from side to side. His voice dropped to a whisper. “This is a matter of national security.”

That did it. She whirled, eyes flashing. “I know exactly what it’s a matter of. What, BARDA didn’t screw up my life enough already?”

The agents exchanged glances. Then Fortier said, “You’re right. We are here because of someone from BARDA.”

“Uh-huh. So you can just—”

“We have a message from Dr. Barnard.”

That stopped her. “Don Barnard?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Donald Barnard had been her boss at the CDC. The only one who had stood with her when her world came crashing down.

“Is Don all right? Why didn’t he just call? Or come down himself? What is—?”

“Dr. Barnard’s presence was required in Washington. He is… very busy.”

Fortier looked truly worried—whether about Barnard or something else, Hallie couldn’t tell.

“So you came all this way to give me a message?”

“Fifteen minutes, Dr. Leland. Please. But not here.”

“I’m the blue Tundra outside. Follow me to my house.”

“Nice place.”

The first time Agent Whittle had spoken and his voice wavered. The oppressive, soggy, boiling heat. He had the fishy, white-lipped look people got before they fainted. Hallie saw it, but she was not feeling charitable. If he can’t take the heat, screw him.

“Thanks,” she said. The rented house wasn’t really nice. Some shutters were missing, the faded blue paint was alligatoring, and the small screened porch listed. But inside it was neat and clean, with white-painted floors and walls, and smelled of fresh oranges. There was, however, no air-conditioning.

“Warm down here,” Whittle said. He was a sizable man who appeared to be in good shape, but his voice sounded weak and thin. They were sitting in chairs at her chrome-and-Formica kitchen table, original equipment with the house.

“You get used to it. No worse than D.C. in August.”

“It’s February, though. How hot is it, exactly?”

“About ninety in here. Ninety-eight outside. So, not too bad. High humidity today, though.”

“Lord God.” Whittle loosened his blue-and-green tie, unbuttoned his collar. Mopped sweat from his face with a damp handkerchief. “I’m from North Dakota. It doesn’t get like this.”

Hallie was afraid he might actually keel off the chair. If there was one thing she did not need this day, it was a heat-stroked Fed flopping around on her kitchen floor.

“Hold on.” She took a fluted pitcher from the refrigerator and poured three tall glasses of cold, homemade lemonade. Condensation filmed the glasses in a second. She added sprigs of mint from her backyard herb garden and brought the glasses to the table. Hallie sipped hers, studying the agents. Whittle gulped half of his lemonade, then held the glass against his forehead.

“Thank you.” There was serious gratitude in his voice.

“About Don?”

“Yes. Just a second.” Fortier put his briefcase on the table and begin working through its three combination locks.

Agent Whittle took another long drink of lemonade, then looked at Hallie in an odd way. “Could I ask you a question, Dr. Leland? It’ll take Agent Fortier a minute here.”

“Shoot.”

“Well, I was wondering what happened to your friend back there.”

“You mean Mary? The shop owner?”

“Yes.”

“She was an Apache pilot in Iraq. Patrolling her sector one day when she monitored a combat patrol screaming for air support. Insurgents had them surrounded. Command denied their request. The fighters were known to have Stingers and the brass probably figured soldiers were easier to replace than choppers. Mary went in anyway. She saved the team, but the bad guys brought her down with a Stinger. Her copilot was killed. Mary survived the crash but… well, you saw. She should have gotten the Medal of Honor.”

“What medal did she get?”

“None. ‘Lieutenant Stilwell is dishonorably discharged for willful disobeyance of orders from a superior officer and wanton disregard for the safety of her copilot, her actions resulting in destruction of Army assets and the death of said copilot,’ is how the court-martial finding read, if I recall right.”

Agent Whittle blinked, looked out the window. “I’m sorry to hear that. You get a feeling sometimes. I lost a son in Iraq.”

The words stung. At least Mary was alive. “I’m sorry, Agent Whittle. I have a soft spot in my heart for soldiers. My father was career Army.” She reached forward and touched his arm, realizing that her eyes had teared up.

“Thank you.” He continued to look out the window. Hallie hadn’t added all her history with Mary, how they had been best friends at Georgetown University and she had gone on to graduate school at Hopkins while Mary abandoned plans for medical school and joined the Army instead. Mary had been chasing her Big Sister the Doctor’s achievements all her life, and going to med school would have been just another step in her shadow. But flying an Apache—that would be something. Mary graduated from flight school at Fort Rucker second in her class and asked for the hottest region of operation, which at the time was around Fallujah in Iraq.

Agent Fortier set on the table what looked like an oversized BlackBerry, unfolded two side panels, pressed a button. One soft tone, then a cone of rose-colored light blossomed, and Don Barnard was there on her table. His head and chest, anyway.

The hologram spoke: “Hello, Hallie! Can you see me okay?”

It took her a moment to respond. “I… can see you fine, Don.” The image was unbelievably real. Every hair of his big white mustache was clearly visible, his bushy eyebrows and sharp blue eyes and his weekend sailor’s sunburn.

“I can see you, too. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“This is you I’m talking to? Not some CG thing?”

“It’s me. I just couldn’t get away right now.”

She smiled at the sight of him for another moment, then decided it was time to drive the conversation forward.

“What’s going on, Don?”

His smile faded. “We have a problem, Hallie, and time is of the essence. I—we—need your help.”

She actually laughed. “My help? Come on, they ran me out of there on a rail.”

“You know how I felt about that. It was a rotten deal.”

“I know that you were the only one in my corner.”

“And I would be there again. Look, Hallie, can you come up here?”

“You mean, like now?”

“Yes.”

“In a day or two, I guess. I work for a friend, Don. She’ll need some—”

“Can’t wait, Hallie. We need you now. Someone will speak to Mary.”

“How did you know—Never mind. But you won’t tell me why?”

“Can’t. Even these things can be hacked. I’m sure the agents have mentioned national security.”

“Was I supposed to take that seriously?”

“Indeed.”

“This has nothing to do with the other business?”

“No. Nothing. My word on that.”

“Okay.” Hallie believed him, but wanted to be clear. “Those bastards can piss in their hats for all I care.”

“I think we agree on that.”

“I’ll come. What happens now?”

“Agents Fortier and Whittle will take it from here. Thank you, Hallie. We’ll speak soon.”

His image dissolved.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked Whittle, who was drinking the last of his lemonade and looking better.

Her hospitality had softened their official crust. He smiled and shook his head. “For this mission we’re just high-end errand boys, Dr. Leland.”

“Do I have time to pack?”

“They’ll have things for you on the other end.”

“Jesus. Well, then I’m ready when you are, gentlemen.”

They walked out. She locked the door and followed the agents to their black Expedition with tinted windows, where Whittle held a rear door for her. They had left the engine running to keep the air-conditioning on. She got in and it was like sitting down in a meat locker. When he saw that she was settled, he said, “Thank you, Dr. Leland,” before gently closing the door.

This, she had to admit, was more like it.

SIX

“HALLIE!”

Donald Barnard, MD, PhD, had started at tight end for the University of Virginia in 1968 and ’69. He was now twenty pounds heavier and decades older, but still solid. He hauled around his desk like a bear rolling out of its den, big hand extended, looking happy and relieved and exhausted all at once. Hallie brushed his proffered hand aside and gave him a long, hard hug, then held him at arm’s length. She frowned.

“You look tired, Don.” It was just after seven in the evening. She knew he started his workdays at six-thirty A.M.

“That makes two of us.” He stepped back. “You remember Lew Casey? Lew was Delta Lab supervisor when you were here.”

It was only then that she noticed the two men who had been standing off to one side in Barnard’s large office while he and Hallie said hello. Dr. Lewis Casey was a short man in his fifties with milky skin, a blizzard of freckles, and hair like curls of rusty wire.

“I remember him very well. It’s good to see you again, Doctor.”

“And I remember you, Dr. Leland.” Casey stepped forward, shook her hand. “I always admired your work. Tried to steal you for Delta, in fact.”

She looked at Barnard. “You never told me that.”

“Lew was not the only one, I can assure you.” Barnard appeared, very briefly, sheepish.

“Thank you, Dr. Casey. I’m honored to hear you say that.” Despite herself, Hallie was pleased.

“Lew does fine. And I’ll call you Hallie, if that’s all right with you?”

“Of course.”

Barnard turned to the third man, who, Hallie could tell with a second’s glance, was no scientist. Too neat, too polished, too perfect. Could have stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalog. He was slim and tan, wearing a tailored, three-piece suit of fine brown wool and what looked to be handmade English shoes. His razor-cut brown hair lay tight against his scalp and he sported a meticulously trimmed mustache. An otter, Hallie thought. Sleek and shiny and uncatchable. CIA was written all over him. His handshake was firm, and when he locked eyes with hers something inside her shuddered. The man had done some things.

“David Lathrop. With Central Intelligence.”

“Hallie Leland. With Deep Enough Dive Shop.”

He got it, laughed. “Don has told us both a great deal about you. His admiration is unbounded.”

She felt herself blushing. “Thank you.”

They settled into red leather chairs at a coffee table across the big office from Barnard’s desk. She hadn’t been sure how it would feel, coming back to BARDA, but here in Don’s office, at least, it was good. Barnard’s time in government entitled him to several rooms with tall windows on the top floor of a building that was, by design, four utterly unremarkable stories above ground and tucked back in a declining industrial park in Prince George’s County. The office walls could have been those of any senior bureaucrat in Washington, covered with framed citations, pictures of Barnard with his wife, Lucianne, and their two sons, plus photos of Barnard with senators and generals and presidents.

“Florida’s obviously agreeing with you.” Barnard looked pleased.

“Sunnier there. Smells better, too.”

“You deserved a respite, Hallie.”

“It’s good for a while. But I’m already starting to feel…”

“Bored?”

“Unchallenged.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Barnard fiddled with the big meerschaum pipe he had not smoked for fifteen years. “Well, you’re surely wondering why you’re here.”

“You could say that. It’s been a short, strange trip.” Fortier and Whittle had put her on a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, which had taken her to a government Citation jet at a restricted airfield, which had flown her to Andrews, where another helicopter had brought her here. It was well after dark now.

“The request originated at the highest level.”

“You mean from the OD?” Office of the Director, CDC, of which BARDA was a part. Despite her fatigue, Hallie was sitting up straight, legs crossed, elbows on the chair arms, fingers tented.

“No. The White House.”

“Yeah, right. Don, I came too far for jokes.”

Lathrop broke in: “He’s not joking, Dr. Leland. I can assure you. Shortly before you arrived we were on a videoconference with President O’Neil.” He smiled. “It wasn’t long, but it was the president.”

Barnard nodded. “I’ve been briefing the president, Vice President Washinsky, Secretary of Homeland Security Mason, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Rathor every day.”

She saw no humor in his eyes, just fatigue, concern, and—something she had never seen before in her former boss—a hint of fear.

“Okay. What’s going on?”

Lathrop’s voice was smooth and modulated, like an FM radio announcer’s, but as he spoke this time it grew tight.

“Almost two weeks ago, one of our soldiers in Afghanistan was wounded at a combat outpost called Terok. Not seriously, but he was admitted to his base’s medical unit. That’s when it started.”

“What started?”

“Watch this. Don?”

Barnard punched buttons on a remote. A large flat-screen monitor on a near wall glowed to life. Hallie watched as the image on the screen showed a room with lime-green walls. It contained a stainless steel table, sinks, scales, trays of evil-looking instruments, and a wall of cold-storage lockers.

A figure walked into the picture wearing a blue Chemturion Biosafety Level 4 suit. Inflated to maintain positive pressure, it looked like the space suits in Buck Rogers movies, right down to the clear, bucket-shaped hood and futuristic backpack containing the battery-powered personal life support system. The attendant opened a locker door and rolled out a stainless steel rack. She unzipped the orange cadaver bag and pushed it open, exposing the body inside.

Hallie came half out of her chair, gaping. “Jesus Christ! Did terrorists do that?”

“Iatrogenic. It happened in Terok’s medical unit.” Lathrop shook his head as he said this, as though having difficulty believing it, despite the grisly evidence before them at that moment.

“How?”

“Just watch for a bit.”

The camera moved. Hallie saw close-ups, plate-sized patches of skin missing, exposed red tissue and even, in a few places, white bone. She had seen skinless cadavers in graduate school at Hopkins, but, treated with formaldehyde and phenol, they’d looked more like pink wax. This body was like fresh meat.

The screen faded to black. Barnard turned to Hallie. “That is … was Army Specialist DeAengelo Washington. A fine young soldier, from what I was told.”

“Was he captured? Tortured?”

“No. He wasn’t the one wounded. That young man is in another locker in the same morgue. It was ACE.”

“Acinetobacter? Can’t be. ACE doesn’t do that.”

“What do you know about ACE, Dr. Leland?” Lathrop asked.

“Thirty-one known species, thirty benign. One, Acinetobacter baumannii, is drug-resistant, but not often fatal in healthy adults. Transmissible by inhalation, ingestion, or through damaged skin. Lungs are the primary infection site, but it can also initiate in the urinary tract, stomach, or bowel.”

She paused a moment, not sure how much they wanted to hear. When no one said anything, she continued: “ACE loves hospitals. It can live for months on a stethoscope or examining table. But the biggest infection vectors are catheters. Of all bacteria, ACE has one of the highest transmutation indexes.”

“That’s exactly right,” Don Barnard affirmed. “All ACE species, including baumannii, have an extraordinary ability to exchange genes with each other through carrier viruses called bacteriophages. It’s almost like the way ants communicate with pheromones. Information, including immunity to an antibiotic, can spread through an entire population with astonishing speed. A matter of hours, in some cases. Back in 2005, geneticists at Stanford broke the code of a new ACE strain and found the greatest number of genetic upgrades ever discovered in a single organism.”

Hallie sat forward. “I remember that. But ACE only endangers people with compromised immune systems—HIV sufferers, the elderly, burn victims, chemotherapy patients.”

“And people with severe tissue trauma.” Lathrop sounded angry.

She understood. “Like wounded soldiers.”

“Correct.”

“Okay. But after ACE outbreaks in New York hospitals killed some older people in 2002, they dusted off a 1950s antibiotic called colistin. It worked. On some of the people some of the time, anyway.”

“All true, Hallie.” Barnard frowned, rubbed the pipe bowl with his thumb as if trying to remove something foul.

“So what happened over there? They didn’t have any colistin?”

“They got some. It just slowed ACE down. And colistin is in very short supply. Nobody has produced it in any quantity for at least forty years.”

“But surely ACE didn’t cause what we saw on that video?”

“It did. We have conclusive test results.”

“How?”

“It is a new ACE.” Lew Casey spoke for the first time, sitting forward in the chair, elbows on knees, looking up at them from beneath wiry red brows.

That stopped her. “So this is biowar, finally?”

“Possible, but the intelligence people don’t think so. More likely, antigenic shift.”

“How did it do that to him?”

“This new ACE apparently grows in the bloodstream, then attacks organs and skin from inside out.”

“Bacteria usually burrow deeper, where it’s easier to propagate.”

“This ACE does just the opposite. It wants out. And it gets out fast.”

“Like being skinned alive, slowly.” Hallie tried to imagine what it would be like, but then gave up. “No drug on earth could blunt that agony.”

“No.” Barnard looked grim. “None.”

“It’s horrible,” she said. “But at least it’s contained.”

Barnard coughed, looked at the others.

“There are more cases?”

“His squadmate, a kid from Kansas, was the first—the zero man. Since then, two nurses and another patient in the medical unit.”

“Who’s in charge at that place?”

Barnard took a deep breath, let it out, rearranged his bulk in the chair. “An Army doctor. National Guard, actually. It’s a field hospital with Level II trauma capability and that little morgue you saw, but they stabilize serious cases for transport to CENMEDFAC, in Kabul.”

“He’s still in there?”

“She. By herself, unfortunately. The Taliban launched a region-wide offensive. May or may not be a correlation. But there have been heavy casualties, so Terok’s other two doctors were called to other COPs.”

“She’s dealing with wounded and ACE. Tough assignment.”

“Yes.”

“Well, at least that COP is quarantined. Terok, was it?”

Again Barnard hesitated, stared down at his pipe’s empty bowl.

“My God, Don. People got out? How many?”

“Two went back to a forward operating base called Salerno, fifty miles east. But the big worry is CENMEDFAC.”

“The mother of all Army hospitals over there.”

“Right. Four patients were transferred there. All had contact with the cases at Terok.”

“CENMEDFAC sends the worst cases stateside.”

“Right.”

“So it could be coming here.”

“It is here, Dr. Leland.” Lathrop, sitting forward. “Some of them arrived two days ago.”

For a moment, nobody spoke. Hallie was stunned, the ramifications spinning out in her mind. As they sat in silence, Barnard’s secretary, Carol, came in. It was well after working hours, but she would never leave until he did. She was a trim widow with a rust-red beehive hairdo and a different-colored polyester pant suit for every day of the month.

“Here you are. I thought you people might want a snack.” She placed a tray with roast beef and turkey sandwiches and a big pot of coffee on the table.

“Thank you,” Hallie said. “I needed this. Nothing since breakfast.”

Carol put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s good to see you again, Hallie. I’ve missed you.”

Hallie smiled, patted her hand. “I’ve missed you, too, Carrie. You and Don.”

After a moment, Carol left them. The men poured cups of coffee but took nothing to eat. Hallie gobbled half a sandwich, poured coffee, dumped in cream and sugar. Not her usual way, but she needed energy.

“So where do things stand now?” She got the words out through a mouthful of roast beef.

“Colistin is buying us some time.” Barnard did not look relieved saying that.

“But it’s like water building up behind a dam. Colistin is the dam,” Lew Casey put in. “Those four cases from Terok remained at CENMEDFAC for three days. During that time they came in contact with dozens of patients and staff.”

“Where did the cases go here in the U.S.?”

The two scientists looked at Lathrop.

“Reed got one, Bethesda another, and two went to the burn center in Georgia.”

Hallie stopped chewing. “Those places are full of people with compromised immune systems. ACE will burn through them like fire in a hay barn.”

“And it will keep going,” Barnard continued. “There’s constant interchange between military facilities like those.”

“This is horrific. You’ve got thousands of sick and wounded soldiers in facilities all over the country. They might have survived combat injuries only to be killed in our own hospitals.” Feeling her eyes fill, Hallie set her cup down. “Sorry, gentlemen.”

“Don’t worry. A little emotion is good for the blood,” said Barnard, and the others nodded. “But it gets even worse. If this ACE can really attack healthy subjects as well…”

“The entire armed forces could be decimated. Not just the sick and wounded.”

“You see now why your presence is so important.”

“You need the drug we had been working on. Superdrug for a superbug.”

“Yes. You were close. Another few months and I believe you’d have had a whole new family of antibiotics.”

“Weeks, maybe.” Hallie recalled the research very well.

“That’s why Don wouldn’t let me spirit you away, actually.” Lew Casey sounded rueful.

“But I never finished. For obvious reasons. So Al must not have done it, either.”

Barnard shook his head. “Dr. Cahner—Al—is a very good microbiologist. I know the two of you got on well. And did fine work together.”

The two of them had worked well as a team, but it had been more complicated than that. More than twenty years older than Hallie, Al had reminded her, at first meeting, of those men she saw scrutinizing labels in supermarket aisles and reading books over the daily specials in chain restaurants. For their first months in the lab together, he spoke of nothing but work and always lunched by himself. He was never rude, just solitary.

But month after month they worked, pressed together in the microbiology laboratory, always conscious that they were in the company of Level 4 pathogens that had killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history. She came to respect Cahner’s grace under pressure and the precision of his lab techniques. She sensed, too, that he recognized her own dedication to good science and, even more, admired her ability to handle demons like Yersinia pestis with steady hands.

After eight months they started eating lunch together in the canteen. His meal never varied: a Red Delicious apple, a carton of V-8 juice, tuna salad on whole wheat with lettuce and tomato. He wasn’t much for idle chat, but she learned that he’d happily talk about microbiology. One day she mentioned that the CDC had just sent a team of pathogen hunters to some caves in Gabon.

Munching a bit of sandwich, he said casually, “Those African caves are nasty. I was in Bandubyo myself.”

She almost dropped her coffee. “Bandubyo?”

He looked sheepish, meeting her astonished gaze. “Well, yes. It was back in—let me think—’03 or maybe ’04.”

“My God. Ebola-B was discovered in that cave. The worst of the Ebola family. What were you doing there?”

“I was part of a WHO team of virologists and microbiologists. Some people had contracted hemorrhagic fever after eating Passiflora edulis grown near the cave.”

“Passion fruit.”

“Right. We determined that fruit bats from the cave contaminated the crops. Passion fruit and cassava both, in fact.”

“Bandubyo,” she repeated, shaking her head. “That is supposed to be one hell of a cave.”

“There was a lot of vertical. And to penetrate the dark zone we had to do some diving. Inside, the cave was clean. But from the twilight zone with its bat chamber on out—red-hot with what turned out to be that new species of Ebola virus.”

“I hadn’t realized you did that kind of fieldwork.”

“Oh, when the need arises. I don’t get out often enough to keep my skills really sharp. But I can still hold my own if I have to.”

This was a side of Al Cahner she had not known about and would not have suspected. But he was trim and looked reasonably fit, so it was not completely outlandish to imagine him exploring wild caves. And she could not help but admire him for it. Penetrating viral caves was as bad as fieldwork got, partly because it was so dangerous and required a host of technical skills like rock climbing and vertical rope work and scuba diving. The really bad part, though, was that such caves sometimes housed pathogens of unearthly virulence.

“I gather you’ve done some cave work yourself,” he said.

I wonder what else he knows about me? Hallie thought, but didn’t press the subject. BARDA was not a large facility. People talked.

“Yes. For fun and work both. A lot of cave diving, too.”

“It takes a special kind of person to do that for fun. It is dangerous business.”

“There’s no margin for error, that’s for sure.”

They talked a bit more about caves and viruses, then went back to their food. But the conversation had changed Hallie’s perception of her lab partner. There’s more there than meets the eye, she thought. And then: All he needs is a little TLC.

Their bond grew, and as the months passed they talked about themselves, laughed at odd fellow workers, bitched about the bureaucracy, damned do-nothing politicians—took the small risks that inched them closer together. Of all the things they talked about, Hallie was most surprised to find that Al Cahner was a walking encyclopedia of baseball statistics. He was especially fond of the 1950s—“baseball’s golden age,” he called it. He could recite ERAs and slugging percentages and double-play combos as if he were reading them off a page. He also delighted in the sounds of baseball. Not the smack of a fastball in a catcher’s mitt or the ring of a cleanly hit home run. The sounds he found most beautiful were players’ names, which he loved to recite, almost like a kind of poetry:

“Granny Hamner. Enos Slaughter. Ryne Duren.” Pause. “Paolo Discomenides. Hart Workman. Joe Bolt.” Pause. “Gino Cimoli. Rabbit Hopper. Artie Dedeaux.”

Hallie had never been a baseball fan. One of her brothers had played cornerback for Duke; the other had been a flanker for the University of Colorado on a nationally ranked team. Both had been high school standouts, so she had been watching football games since she was ten. Nevertheless, she enjoyed listening to her lab partner’s name-poems, and enjoyed, as well, seeing him smile.

On her last afternoon, when stone-faced security guards escorted her back to retrieve her personal effects, Cahner appeared stunned. The blood drained from his face so rapidly she feared he might pass out. But then, glaring at the guards, he asked what in God’s name was happening. They just stood and stared. He turned to her.

“I’m leaving” was all she could say, and she knew it was only the first of many such encounters to come.

After several unsuccessful tries to learn more from her, he again fired sharp questions at the guards, who only shrugged. One said, “Hey, we don’t know anything. We’re just doing our jobs here, you know?”

Cahner started to berate the two men, but Hallie said, “It’s not them, Al,” and he let it go. So all he could do was stand and gape during the ten minutes it took for her to collect the pictures of her family, epidemiology reference books, laptop, back issues of Science. By the time she finished, she saw that he had composed himself somewhat.

As they shook hands for the last time, he held on and said, “This is horrible, Hallie. I don’t know what to say. But if you ever need anything that I can provide, you must call.”

She nodded and, still holding his hand, leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, which made his eyes fill with tears.

Barnard pulled her back from those recollections. He said, “There has been no breakthrough.”

She understood. “Or else you wouldn’t have me here.”

“Right.”

With the coffee and sandwiches, she was feeling better, but sensed she was missing something still. “Why haven’t I heard anything about this in the media?”

“Damage control at the highest levels. President O’Neil has called in quite a few chits. But it won’t stay contained for long.” Lathrop sounded pained.

“How many military hospitals are there?” Hallie wanted to run the numbers.

“More than two thousand in the U.S. More overseas.”

“How many patients in those?”

“As of six P.M. yesterday, 217,452.”

“And not just from this war, but from others, right? Plus all those dependents hospitalized to give birth, get hernias fixed, whatever.”

“That’s right.”

Hallie felt sick. “So it’s not only active-duty soldiers. Families packed into bases, circulating through movie theaters, clinics, gyms, kindergartens. My God, the list is endless. You could not create better pandemic conditions if you tried. What’s the transmission factor?”

“Unknown,” said Barnard. “The other ACE is similar to smallpox.”

Lew Casey continued: “Smallpox carriers take about seven days to become contagious. After that, in an urban environment, they infect an average of twelve people every twenty-four hours. Those carriers infect others. Exponential growth. A million or more in two weeks.”

Lathrop rubbed his face. “Military bases, with higher population densities than cities, would be much worse. Ships at sea, submarines—the Pentagon, for God’s sake.”

Then Barnard spoke, in a tone Hallie had never heard him use before:

“ ‘Potentially the worst threat since Pearl Harbor.’ Those are not my words, but President O’Neil’s.”

SEVEN

HALLIE POURED HERSELF MORE COFFEE. SHE TURNED TO LATHROP.

“Is anything else being done?”

“Yes, of course. Everything possible with the information still on close hold, anyway. But it’s all reactive.”

“How long do you think we have, Don?”

“With colistin and aggressive containment, ten to fourteen days. No more.”

“That’s not enough time.”

“No.”

“So the only real hope is…”

“That highly classified work you had been doing here at BARDA.”

Classified. BARDA.

She had been so focused on the burgeoning catastrophe that she had all but forgotten what had happened thirteen months earlier. Now those two words took her back to the small and windowless room—its smells of cigarette smoke and body odor, its contents a metal conference table, six chairs, and two men. The table and chairs were gray, the men were black and white.

“Please close the door and have a seat.”

The black man’s voice was cool, neutral. Neither rose or offered to shake hands.

“My name is David Rhodes. I’m the ARILO—agency research integrity liaison officer with the CDC’s Office of General Counsel—for your case.” He spoke slowly, carefully, sculpting each word, the cadence of a preacher at a funeral.

“My case?” Hallie had been peremptorily summoned from her lab and was not happy. “And who is he?”

“Agent Rivers is with HHS. Office of Internal Security.”

Rhodes was smooth and utterly composed. A lawyer’s lawyer. His cologne smelled like sun-warmed roses. The other one wore a cheap suit and his tie had a stain just below the knot. A double-dipping ex-cop or maybe ex-Bureau. His cologne smelled like industrial disinfectant. Rivers’s face was a collection of wrinkles and pinches from a lifetime of frowning. Rhodes’s was smooth as dark ice. He had a thick neck and that quiet, precise voice. A manila folder lay in front of him, perfectly squared to the angles of the table. Looking at it, and at his huge hands, she saw that he wore a Penn State ring. Linebacker, she thought.

“You need to know that I am in the middle of extremely critical—”

“We know whachure workin’ on.” Rivers cut her off, bored, looking at the ceiling.

“And we are aware of its importance.” Rhodes kept his eyes on hers. “That’s one reason we’re here. There has been a security breach. Traced to you.”

First came denial: she laughed. “A security breach? Is this some kind of prank? Did Don Barnard put you up to this? The lab people?”

“No joke, Doc.” Rivers hacked out a smoker’s phlegmy rattle. He did not cover his mouth, and microdroplets of saliva sprayed the table.

Buy time. “Show me some ID, gentlemen.”

They had valid credentials. Rivers’s included a gold badge with blue numbers. When he put his black leather ID folder away, she noted that he made sure to flash the Glock 9mm in its brown Bianchi shoulder holster.

“What kind of complaint?”

“It appears that you have been providing secure research information to an outside party for unauthorized remuneration.”

She translated the bureaucratese in her mind. “You’re talking about selling government secrets?”

“That’s right.”

“First, that is a lie.” Hallie tried not to sound like it, but she was furious and afraid. “Second, if there is to be an investigation, you are required first to inform me and my immediate superior, allow me to retain counsel, and present your allegations before a panel headed by the associate director of science and including at least one CDC employee of my choosing.”

“You’ve read your personnel manual.” Rhodes seemed impressed.

Rivers did not. “What the personnel manual don’t include is that with national security, that personnel process goes in the dumpster.”

National security. Twenty-first-century McCarthyism.

“How long has this inquiry been going on?”

“I’m not at liberty to divulge that.” Rhodes tapped the manila folder with his index finger. A fly buzzed around Rivers, who seemed not to notice. “But we’re confident that a court would find probable cause to believe a security breach occurred and that you were responsible.”

“This is insane!” Hallie jumped out of her chair. “I’m getting the hell out of here and calling my lawyer, gentlemen.”

Rhodes’s voice, soft but urgent, stopped her. “Dr. Leland. I seriously advise you to wait. Hear us out. Then you can always retain counsel… and so forth.”

That was reasonable. Still furious, she sat back down. “So tell me.”

“Emails have been intercepted. From your home computer to and from an external source, containing secure BARDA information. Deposits have also been tracked to an account in your name at Grand Cayman National Bank. They correspond to payments and dates in the emails.”

“This is unbelievable. I don’t have a Cayman account, Mr. Rhodes. Never have.”

Rivers suddenly sat up straight, put his elbows on the table. “We don’t even have to talk to you, Doc. We could refer this to the United States attorney. Like that.” He snapped his fingers and in the small room it sounded like a slap. “For criminal charges.”

It was like trying to fight her way through a whiteout in the mountains, no points of reference, cliffs and crevasses all around. Stop. Make them wait. “Rhodes and Rivers. What a coincidence.”

No one smiled.

“What’s in that folder?” she asked. “The charges?”

Rhodes pushed a single sheet of BARDA stationery across to Hallie. It had today’s date. She read it, looked up in disbelief.

“This is a letter of resignation.”

“Better for the gubment.” Rivers poked a finger at her. “Better for you.”

“Jesus Christ. Look, I need to think about this. To talk to a lawyer, at least. You can understand that. Isn’t that my right?”

“Absolutely.” Rhodes looked at her calmly. “But you should understand that we can make this offer here, now. On the table for this meeting. If you walk, it goes away.”

“It was me, I’d take it.” Now Rivers tried to sound collegial, supportive. She found him less nauseating the other way, but ignored him regardless.

“All it needs is your signature, Dr. Leland.” Rhodes waited, watching her.

She was furious and terrified and confused. Her face felt hot. It was hard to get a good breath in the small room, its air thick with the men’s smells.

“Who was I supposed to be selling data to?”

Rhodes glanced at Rivers. “I’m not at liberty to divulge that.”

Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She had no frame of reference, no experience to fall back on that might help her know how to react. But she did know that Washington was always all about leverage, and suddenly something occurred to her.

“What’s CDC afraid of? Why are you doing this in secret?”

For the first time she saw a glimmer of uncertainty in Rhodes’s eyes. He twisted the Penn State ring, looked at Rivers, who shrugged, more concerned with the little wart on his left palm that he was picking with the fingernails of his other hand. Rhodes took a while, appearing to consider his words very carefully.

“You know how important secrecy is to BARDA’s mission. Therefore to CDC’s. A very public security-breach trial could do irreparable harm. There are people in the government who would like for BARDA to go away. Every dollar spent here is a dollar not spent on guns and tanks. If you get my drift.” With his two index fingers, he drew a pentagon in the air.

Leverage. Now she had some. Now they were afraid.

“I could walk out of here right now, gentlemen. Make just three calls. My lawyer, my senator, and the Washington Post.” Like there really is a “my lawyer,” she thought. But they would not know that. Or… maybe they would.

“That’s true, Dr. Leland.” Rhodes’s hands were folded on the tabletop again. “But you may know how much Washington lawyers cost. And as I said, if you walk out of here, we have no choice. It goes to the U.S. attorney immediately. There will be preliminary hearings, discovery, perhaps press conferences. Possible criminal charges, as Agent Rivers said. Think carefully. A government scientist selling top secret biological research—”

“Alleged,” she snapped so sharply that Rivers looked up from his wart.

Rhodes nodded, smiled, happy to stipulate the parsing that, she herself knew, would make not a whit of difference. “Yes, alleged to be selling top secret research. Even if you are cleared, your career will be over. Why would anyone hire you when there are thousands of untainted microbiologists out there?”

“I’m telling you, Doc, you’re better off taking what we’re offering.” Rivers’s smile showed yellow smoker’s teeth and a serious lack of flossing. She almost screamed at him to shut up. But she knew that Rhodes was right.

She could not afford a pricey lawyer. Her mother had some money, but Hallie would never ask for it. Even if she got a lawyer, the story would be in the Post and on the news programs for days. National news. International, probably. The media liked few things better than espionage stories. Genocide, maybe, and senators getting caught with bimbos or, even better, seducing pages of the same sex, but not much else. The stories would include her side, of course, but their allegations would have the real weight. She could see the headlines:

LEAKS FROM SECRET BIORESEARCH LAB

WOMAN SCIENTIST IMPLICATED

“You ever read about D.C. Jail?” Rivers seemed to know her thoughts, spoke while examining the wart on his palm. “I been there, Doc, dropping perps off. Terrible things happen. Especially to people like you.”

“You can really do this?” She ignored Rivers, addressed Rhodes. There were not many things she feared, but Hallie was honest enough to admit that being locked in the District of Columbia Jail was one. The stories that came out of that place—broom-handle rapes, mutilations, medieval things.

“Yes. We can.”

She could fight but, as Rhodes said, even if she won, she lost. Or she could sign. Go quietly. Live to fight another day.

Hallie had never been the kind of person who agonized over decisions. Weigh risks and benefits, figure the calculus, make the call. Another day always came. She looked up. Rhodes was holding out a pen. Rivers leaned back, smirking, fat hands folded on his paunch.

A part of Hallie wanted to curse them. Instead, she reached into the pocket of her lab coat and took out the Mont Blanc Meisterstück Solitaire her father had given her when she’d received her doctorate at Hopkins.

“I have my own.”

Without hurrying, she uncapped the pen, signed her name, ignored Rivers, and looked Rhodes in the eye.

“You’re doing a bad thing here, Mr. Rhodes. Sooner or later, we all pay for the bad things we do.”

The fly buzzed around Rivers’s head, and he still seemed oblivious to it. Rhodes kept his eyes locked on hers, saying nothing, but he rubbed his Penn State ring as if it were an amulet and she saw a flicker in his dark eyes, sudden and bright and quickly gone, that told her he knew it to be true.

EIGHT

NOW, IN BARNARD’S OFFICE, IT WAS NOT LOST ON HER THAT she could simply say, Sorry, gentlemen, BARDA screwed me royally, and walk right out.

But really, she didn’t even come close to that. Instead, she sat thinking of the thousands of young soldiers. And not only young ones. Old ones, too, from older wars, hanging on in VA hospitals all over the country, living out their lives with whatever remnants of bodies and minds their wounds and wars had left them. And soldiers’ families. It went on and on.

“You said Al is still working on the project.”

“That’s right.”

“How much biomatter does he have left?”

Barnard looked embarrassed. “None, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all gone? Every last milligram?”

The basis of their research had been an extremophile from the Archaea domain. She had retrieved the biosamples while on an expedition exploring a monstrous cave in Mexico called Cueva de Luz. She had brought almost 100 grams of viable organism out of the cave with her. Half of that had expired before they learned how to keep it alive. When she had left over a year ago, more than 20 grams had remained. In microbiological terms, that was a ton.

“I’m afraid so. Al’s worked himself near to death, Hallie. I worry about him sometimes. And he took your departure hard. But at some point, science goes from craft to art. Al’s a fine craftsman, but he’s not an artist.”

“Can we synthesize replicant?”

Lew Casey broke in: “We’ve tried for months. Can’t get the mitochondrial dissemination right. It could be more months—or never.”

“While thousands of hospitals become…” She searched for the right word.

“Death camps.”

Hallie took a deep breath, sat back, rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t slept now for almost eighteen hours, and the cave rescue had been exhausting. She needed fresh clothes, a hot meal, a shower, sleep. But others were in much, much worse shape. Sleep could wait.

“We have to go back to Cueva de Luz.” She stared at Barnard. “There’s nothing else.”

“You cannot imagine how much I was hoping to hear you say that.”

She’d said it, but not without dread. Cueva de Luz was a true supercave, thousands of feet deep and many miles long, located in the high, remote forest of southern Mexico and filled with bizarre and exotic dangers. Journey to the Center of the Earth but worse, and for real.

“It’s not going to be as easy as it was last time.” Barnard’s voice was grim.

She gaped. “Easy? Don, it was a nightmare. I didn’t think any of us were getting out. Two didn’t, as you know.”

“I know that expedition was hellish. But there are other complications now.”

“Such as?”

Lathrop looked at his gold wafer of a watch. “Dr. Leland, we can fill you in later. Just now, however—”

She ignored Lathrop, addressed Barnard: “We’ll need a team. That will take a week at least.”

Lathrop smiled for the first time since she’d walked into the office. “Already done!”

“What? Where? When do we meet them?”

“Right now. You’re the last to arrive. The others are waiting downstairs.”

It was past nine P.M. when the four of them took a secure elevator to the lowest level that BARDA acknowledged publicly and then dropped on down to Sublevel 1, the first of four classified levels that it did not acknowledge. The elevator stopped. Barnard entered an alphanumeric code on a keypad, the elevator door opened, and they walked forward into a biosecure chamber with gray walls and blue germicidal UV lights. The door slid closed behind them and there was a soft hiss as the chamber’s airtight seals engaged. Clicks and whirs, integrated sensors and analyzers scanning them for pathogens, explosives, biological material. Presently a group of lights on the air lock’s far wall glowed green and the inner door slid open.

The limited access was essential, for reasons well known to Hallie. In January 1989, chimpanzees infected with Ebola Zaire virus had gotten loose inside a research facility in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. They, in turn, had infected hundreds of other chimps. Before long, the entire complex became one vast Ebola-Z growth medium. Hot animals were running amok, others going crazy in their cages, still others breaking out.

Hallie did not routinely work with chimps, but she knew that they were eight times stronger than a human and could eat a man’s face in ten seconds. If any of those animals had escaped, a pandemic of hemorrhagic fever with a 90 percent mortality rate and no known cure would have burned through Washington’s civilian population in two weeks. It would have obliterated the constitutional line of succession like a wet sponge wiping chalk marks off a blackboard. There would not have been an executive, legislative, or judicial branch of government, nor any military command to speak of. Washington, D.C., would have been a cauldron of death.

In the end, only the work of some very brave people and more sheer luck than humanity had any right to expect had averted disaster. But the Monkey Business, as it was known forever after, had had lasting effects. To ensure that nothing like that ever happened again, the CDC had imposed fail-safe security precautions. Now a hot pathogen break might kill many BARDA people, but the bug would find no further hosts. Those BARDA lives would be the price of containment.

They stepped into a long corridor flooded with more watery UV germicidal light, cream-colored walls, tan floor. Though mostly administrative work was done here, some research was ongoing and the air carried odors of alcohol and formaldehyde and disinfectant. People in white lab coats and business suits moved in both directions, some pushing carts, others speaking into Bluetooth-style microphones attached to earpieces. It could have been a hallway in any government building, except that it was almost ten P.M. and everyone was in a hurry.

“How on earth were you able to get me back in here?” Hallie was a little surprised by how good it felt to be back in a place where important science was being done—dangerous important science, at that.

“Friends in high places.”

“But… even after what happened?”

“I couldn’t stop that at the time.” Barnard’s voice tightened with anger every time the subject came up. “But now that we have a situation, they were more willing to listen to reason.”

“You put your career on the line for me, in other words. Again.”

“And I never had a better use for it, Hallie.”

“Hear, hear.” Lew Casey reached up to pat her shoulder reassuringly.

They passed through an unmarked door that opened onto a sparsely furnished anteroom with another inner door, guarded by a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant wearing a crisp uniform and a green beret. He carried a sidearm and had a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun slung across his chest.

Barnard said his own name out loud, pronouncing the syllables carefully, and a green LED light came to life on a panel on the sergeant’s desk.

“Good evening, ma’am, sirs.” The sergeant nodded to each in turn. “Please go right in.”

They walked through the inner door into a rectangular conference room. White ceiling, beige carpet, big flat-screen monitors on sky-blue walls. On a long mahogany table sat pitchers of water, juice, coffee, and plates filled with sandwiches and cookies. Five men sat at the table, and among those was her old research partner, Albert Cahner.

“Hallie!” He jumped out of his chair and came around the table to give her a hug, which she returned, laughing.

“Al! I’m so glad to see you again!” She thumped him on the back.

“It’s wonderful to see you, Hallie.”

They stood there grinning. He was as she remembered, though perhaps with a little more gray in the comb-over now, the circles under his eyes darker. Otherwise, he was the same old Al, wearing a wrinkled blue shirt with a flyaway collar and a skinny tie that had gone out of fashion ten years earlier. He gave her shoulder a final pat and went back to his place at the table.

She took an empty chair and poured herself more coffee. Don Barnard leaned against a wall. Lathrop addressed them.

“I know that you all have traveled hard and must be tired. So let me make a few things clear right away. My name is David Lathrop. Officially I work for Central Intelligence, but for now I report to the secretary of Homeland Security, Hunter Mason. Directly. He reports to the president. Directly. They both know we’re here.”

Lathrop introduced Barnard and Casey, then turned back to those seated at the table.

“We thank each of you for responding to our requests, which must have seemed strange, to say the least. We are grateful beyond measure for your presence here.”

While Lathrop spoke, Hallie eyed the three men at the table she did not know. She pegged them in her own mind as Blond Man, Dark Man, and Big Man.

“More introductions are in order.” Lathrop gestured toward Blond Man. “Dr. Haight”—he pronounced it height—“is a medical doctor from Tennessee. Emergency medicine specialty. An accomplished technical climber, caver, and diver.”

Hallie had thought he looked familiar, and now realized why. “You’re Ron Haight!” she blurted. “You were on the cover of National Geographic last year. They called you ‘the caver saver.’ ”

“Well, yeah, I was.” Haight looked down at the table, grinning and shaking his head.

“Dr. Haight is justly famous for his rescue work,” Lathrop said.

“Please call me Ron.” Haight looked uncomfortable with all the attention, which Hallie found positively endearing.

“You were all muddy, with a helmet and dive mask on. It took me a minute to recognize you,” she said.

“Hard to believe they’d put an ugly mug like this’un on the cover of such a fine magazine, I know.” Haight’s accent was Tennessee thick, his words flowing softly and slowly.

But Hallie thought he had a right nice mug. Haight’s hair was almost as light as hers, worn in a ponytail. He was one of those rare blonds who have dark eyebrows; his were perched high on his forehead and far apart, like quotation marks at the ends of a sentence, making him look perpetually, pleasantly surprised. Beneath those eyebrows were angular features in a lean, open face. He was not tall but had the build of a serious climber, a compact bundle of muscle with about 5 percent body fat. He looked to be in his late twenties.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Haight,” said Hallie. “Sorry, I mean Ron. You saved a couple of friends of mine once.”

Haight nodded, formal, graceful, as if he were bowing to a princess, the deathless courtesy of southern men.

Lathrop turned to Dark Man. “Dr. Rafael Arguello is a paleoanthropologist from the University of New Mexico and a member of the Cuicatec Native American population in Oaxaca, Mexico. He speaks several languages but, most importantly, Cuicatec.”

Arguello was perhaps thirty years older than Haight. He had high cheekbones, olive skin, black eyes, and neatly barbered, shining black hair. His unshaven cheeks looked like someone had smudged charcoal over them. He wore a rumpled business suit and a white shirt with no tie, a professor whisked all the way from New Mexico on the strange wings of power.

“Dr. Arguello has done groundbreaking research on Native American shamanic practices. He underwent shamanic preparation and initiation himself. He also served as a cultural liaison officer with Mexico’s military. And as a paleoanthropologist, he has explored many very serious caves.”

“I should say how pleased I am to meet you, everyone.” Arguello’s accent was unlike any Hallie had heard. Neither Spanish nor English, but something more like the Comanche dialogue she’d heard when she had gone to New Mexico with Stephen Redhorse.

Finally, Lathrop nodded at Big Man. “Dr. Wil Bowman is in our government’s service, on loan to us. He has the requisite skills—diving, climbing, caving. Plus, ah, appropriate security experience.”

Bowman sat directly across the table from Hallie, wearing jeans, running shoes, and an old red rugby shirt. He looked to her like a six-four, 220-pound slab of muscle. His face was a collection of juts and angles: outsized cheekbones, thrusting chin, and prominent nose with a zigzag from more than one break. He had a straw-colored crew cut and a scar divided one of his eyebrows into two short dashes. Bright, hard, unblinking eyes the blue of glacial ice. He had the body of a professional athlete and the face of a warrior. Not beautiful, certainly, but a face that would have held her glance if she had seen him in a restaurant or on the street. His age was less apparent than the others’, but she guessed about forty.

It was her turn. Lathrop said, “Dr. Hallie Leland, BS in microbiology from Georgetown University, PhD in microbiology, Johns Hopkins University. Extremophiles are her area of research. She is an accomplished climber and master technical diver. Her research has taken her into many caves.”

“Is there anything you don’t do?” Bowman looked at her, his eyebrows raised.

“Dishes and laundry.”

She watched him, saw a flicker of something like amusement.

At the same time, Haight laughed out loud. Cahner chuckled, and Arguello said nothing. Whatever had been in Bowman’s eyes was as quickly gone. Not a man to have mad at you, she thought.

NINE

BEFORE LATHROP COULD SPEAK AGAIN, A CELLPHONE BUZZED in his pocket. He retrieved it, turned away. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I understand. Yes, sir. Immediately, sir.” He closed the phone, turned back to them. “Sorry. My boss.”

Lathrop hooked thumbs in his vest pockets and took a breath. “Dr. Cahner was introduced earlier, and Dr. Leland knows him. Let’s move on. All of you know some of why you’re here, but none of you know all.” Lathrop related the background that Hallie had already heard from Barnard. At the end, he repeated the president’s comment about Pearl Harbor.

“Long story short, we need to kill this germ before it kills our military. Whatever your political persuasions, visualize the United States of America without armed forces. Fresh meat for the animals of the world. Al Qaeda would be in every city in a month, with the Taliban right on their heels. And those are just the obvious ones.”

And not just us, Hallie thought. A new kind of domino theory. Take down America and the others go, plunk-plunk-plunk. A world where men behead a woman for flashing an ankle.

“Now about you. The five of you were distilled from a database of hundreds of thousands. Parameters included security clearance potential, fitness and health, unique skill sets, and a couple of other things. Think of yourselves as the only keys for a very complex lock.”

He paused, looked at Barnard. “That’s enough from me. Don?”

Barnard pushed off the wall he had been leaning against. “Let’s back up a bit. The media has talked about ‘supergerms’ in the past, but that’s wrong. They were bugs with acquired resistance, but bugs we knew. ACE, however, really is a supergerm. An entirely new species.

“Something called antigenic shift is probably responsible. Antigenic drift accounts for most evolutionary changes, but it works over eons. Antigenic shift can happen in weeks or days. Or even seconds, at the microscopic level. Viruses and bacteria have a special gift for it. Antigenic shifts caused the influenza pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968.

“We all knew this was coming. We just didn’t know when. To kill a superbacterium, you need a superantibiotic. My section in BARDA had been pursuing one in Dr. Cahner’s lab. He can tell you himself. Al?”

Cahner squirmed, ran a hand over thinning hair. “I, ah, well… maybe we should let Hallie—I mean Dr. Leland—explain. It was her work originally, and I, ah, just…” Cahner looked with desperation at Hallie, who knew how much he hated being in any spotlight, no matter how small.

She glanced at Barnard “Don?”

“Go ahead, Hallie.”

She swigged strong coffee, then began: “Two years ago I accompanied an expedition to a remote cave called Cueva de Luz, in southern Mexico. It’s a supercave, one of the deepest on earth. Maybe the deepest. No one knows for sure. The team included two hydrogeologists, a paleontologist, and me. Five thousand feet deep and four miles into this cave, I found a unique extremophile.”

“Cueva de Luz means ‘Cave of Light,’ ” Haight said. “Why is it called that? There’s no light in any caves I’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t know.” Hallie shrugged. “Maybe Dr. Arguello knows.”

Arguello did not respond immediately. He seemed slightly uncomfortable with all eyes on him. He opened his mouth to speak, then held up his hands, shrugging. “It is not certain.” He knows more than he’s telling us, Hallie thought.

“Dr. Leland—” Lathrop said, to get things back on track. But Arguello was not finished. He had a question: “Wait. I do not understand that term, ‘extremophile.’ ”

Hallie explained: “They survive where nothing should: geo-thermal vents twenty-five thousand feet deep in the ocean, arctic wastes, hyperacidic pools. And in caves. Some persist in absolute darkness for millennia.

“The extremophile I found looked like blue cottage cheese. We called it moonmilk. It was bioluminescent, like some arthropods. Tests revealed genomes we had never seen. Back in the lab one day, I accidentally dropped some onto a tray of petri dishes where we were growing DRTB—drug-resistant tuberculosis—colonies. Level Four biosafety suits are not conducive to fine motor tasks.

“We thought, What the hell, let’s see what happens. The cultures looked like dried splotches of red-and-green vomit. After six hours, little white spots appeared. Three more days and the dishes were white. The DRTB was killed.

“You could spend ten careers and never see something like that. I damn near fainted, let me tell you. So this stuff was right on the outer edge of our science. Definitely from the Archaea domain, but like nothing we’d seen before. We tried it on other DRs. Killed every one.”

“So why are we not giving this… this moonmilk to those soldiers right now?” Arguello sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Because,” said Wil Bowman, “you can’t give an organism in its raw biological state to humans. That would be like feeding people the mold from which penicillin is made.” He spoke very softly, but with undertones that could be humor or could be threat. It was a voice that caught ears and held them. “Plus, they ran out of biomatter before learning how to replicate it.”

Now, how would he know that? Hallie looked at him more closely. This time, when he returned her curious gaze directly, she actually felt a little twinge in her gut.

“Why don’t y’all just send the troops down there and get some more?” said Haight, looking from Barnard to Lathrop to Casey, not sure who should answer.

For the first time, sleek Lathrop looked uneasy. He cleared his throat. “It’s quite complicated, actually. But here’s the situation. Narcotraficantes now control eastern Oaxaca, which includes Cueva de Luz. They are well organized, well armed, and savage beyond belief.”

Arguello gripped the table, his face darkening with anger. “And they perpetrate the most horrible atrocities against Cuicatecs, my own people.”

This Hallie had not known. Before, the region had been idyllic, high mountain forest dotted with white villages overlooking steep-sided, green river valleys. The Cuicatecs she’d met had been reserved but not hostile, always ready to gamble with homemade dice and share their ferocious sugarcane moonshine called aguardiente.

“There is more.” Lathrop rubbed his forehead, stared at his fingernails. He half-turned to look at Barnard, who nodded. When he turned around again, his suit jacket moved aside just enough for Hallie to glimpse the butt of a semiautomatic pistol in a brown leather shoulder holster. That surprised her, but only a little. She knew the joke about the CIA being an employment agency for Skull and Bones, so a Yalie with a gun was not out of the realm of possibility.

“Mexico’s army has gone after the narcos. It is war down there, unconstrained by niceties like Geneva conventions. The Cuicatecs, feeling invaded, are killing narcos and Mexican troops both. A total nightmare.”

“More reason to send in troops, don’t y’all think?” said Haight.

“Illegal-alien issues have strained our relations with Mexico to the breaking point. The demonstrations, riots, both here and there—you’ve all heard. Just now, we could not possibly insert military assets into their sovereign territory. Especially with their own military concentrated in the area.”

“So how ’bout SEALs and Deltas and such? Those black ops guys.”

“SEALs and Deltas are the best warfighters in history, but supercaves are one of the few environments they’re not trained for.” As Bowman said this, Hallie thought, Well, then, bet he was a Delta. She had never known any, but he fit pretty well her vision of one. Except for the “doctor” part. What exactly is he a doctor of?

“Then how in hell’re y’all gonna get us in there?”

“Stealth insertion.” Bowman bit off his words in short bursts. “Tomorrow night. No moon. Our good luck. Already planned. Assets staged. Ready to deploy.”

With all of that laid out, it felt like those moments after a brutal fifteen-round fight when all anyone can do is wait for the decision. Nobody spoke. Haight had untied the ponytail and was running fingers through his blond hair. Al Cahner was looking at his hands. Arguello was tapping an index finger on the table. Bowman sat perfectly still, watching them all. Hallie noted that he was missing the tip of his left little finger.

Haight cleared his throat, spoke: “So let me make sure I understand. Y’all are lookin’ at a catastrophe of biblical proportions. You pulled together a group of total strangers helter-skelter. Nobody but presumably Dr. Bowman has, ah, security experience. But y’all would have us sneak into the middle of a vicious drug war, penetrate one of the deepest caves on earth, retrieve stuff that probably won’t survive the trip out, and then sneak back through the war zone, hopin’ all the while that pissed-off, murderin’ natives don’t shoot us with poison arrows or blowguns or whatever. I don’t work for the government, nor, apparently, do Drs. Leland or Arguello. Since y’all haven’t said anything about payment, this obviously will all be from our patriotic fervor and the goodness of our hearts. Is that about the size of it?”

There had been an expectant pressure in the room, tension generated by crisis and challenge, Lathrop and Barnard working it, shaping it up to a climax. This, clearly, was not the one they had hoped for. The phone in Lathrop’s jacket pocket vibrated over and over. He seemed not to notice. Barnard’s head and eyes and shoulders drooped, like the top stories of a building keeling over slowly, reluctantly, resisting the downward pull to the very last. Barnard was not the kind of man who spent a lot of time looking at the floor. Hallie did not like what was happening here.

She glanced around the table. No one met her eyes except Bowman—who, she got the feeling, had been watching her first. Al Cahner was chewing a cookie, slowly, thoughtfully, as though it might be his last. Arguello was still tapping one finger on the table, rhythmically, as though to a song only he could hear. Bowman sat perfectly still, eyes locked with Hallie’s. Having grown up with two brothers and a soldier father, Hallie had become very good at staring matches. The urge to look away was deeply instinctual, like the urge to gasp in air after a long bout of breath holding, but Hallie would not quit first. Seconds passed. Finally, Bowman pointed an index finger at her, mouthed the words You win, and looked away.

For his part, Lathrop appeared to know quite well what happened in Washington to those who carried bad news to high places. The phone vibrated again. He ignored it.

“I’m afraid that is about the size of it, Dr. Haight.”

“Sounds like a pretty desperate thing.” Haight looked from Lathrop to Barnard.

“We would be lying if we suggested otherwise.” Barnard, returning his gaze directly.

Something had been building in Hallie, and she could contain it no longer. Bowman had distracted her, but now she stood up so quickly her chair tipped over backward and hit the floor with a bang. The door opened and the security officer stood there, surveying. Lathrop waved him back out.

“God damn it.” Beneath the deep tan, Hallie’s face was reddening. “How often do you get the chance to save thousands—maybe millions—of people from horrible deaths? We have just been offered the opportunity of a lifetime, gentlemen.”

“We have to be clear, Dr. Leland,” said Lathrop, “so there is absolutely no misunderstanding. People could die on this mission. It is, as Dr. Haight observed, a desperate thing.”

In her head, Hallie heard her father’s voice: Every day, every single thing you do writes a page in the book of your life. You can write them, but you can never change them.

“We could die driving to work and what good does that do anybody? But we’re not going to die. We are going into that cave to get the moonmilk.”

Ron Haight shook his head, laughed out loud. “Hell, this is the best deal I been offered for an ol’ coon’s age. Savin’ people is what I do for a livin’. Hallie’s right. I’m in like Flynn, y’all.”

Arguello’s index finger landed on the table and stopped. He arranged his face, swallowed, spoke formally. “When my time comes, I do not want to look back on this day and feel shame. I am going.”

Al Cahner reached for another chocolate cookie. “I always intended to go.” His voice was calm, confident. “It was never in question.” The steel there surprised Hallie. It was not something she had heard during their time working together.

They all looked at Lathrop. He stared back, expressionless for a few seconds. Then he raised his coffee cup in salute.

“Lady and gentlemen, we have a team.”

Hallie cut her gaze from Lathrop to Bowman. He winked, the movement nearly imperceptible, accompanied by the tiniest crinkling at the corners of his mouth. The wink and crinkles could have meant anything, but in Hallie’s mind they caused these words to form: Thank you.

For his part, Lathrop looked like a man whose death sentence had just been commuted.

There followed a few long moments of silence as the full significance of their decisions sank in. Then Bowman turned to Hallie.

“You’ve been there. What can you tell us about the cave?”

She looked to Barnard, who nodded, and then she got up and walked to a whiteboard at the front of the room.

“Dr. Haight’s probably the most experienced, but we’ve all been in big caves. Here’s the thing, though. Cueva de Luz isn’t a cave. It’s a supercave.”

She drew a line that plunged from the board’s top left corner toward the bottom right corner with a lot of small, jagged steps in between. It looked like the graph of a badly failing business’s cash flow.

“Cueva de Luz’s profile. About five thousand vertical feet deep. A bit more than four miles from entrance to the cave’s known terminus.”

“Known terminus. So there is more unexplored terrain beyond that point?” Arguello asked.

“It keeps going and going. No one knows how far. We could tell that because wind was ripping up from somewhere deep beyond the place we stopped. Right after the mouth, this cave gets vertical quickly, so we’ll pass through the twilight zone fast. Before you know it, the dark zone just ambushes you. And because of its size and depth, this cave has a special zone not identified in other caves. It’s called the deep zone.”

“Is that name because the terrain down there is different?” Arguello wanted to know.

“You’re much deeper, so the watercourses are bigger, but it has more to do with the psychological impact,” Hallie said. “You know that every human body has a unique response to altitude in the mountains, right? Depth and darkness don’t affect the body that way, but they do the brain. Scientists have studied the phenomenon. Some believe it’s neurochemistry. Down there, the brain knows it’s a mile or whatever from the surface and doesn’t like how that feels. Self-preservation is the oldest, strongest instinct. The brain will do weird things to keep its body alive, like drive a person to fatal panic. When that happens we call it the Rapture.”

“Like the rapture of the deep, in diving?” Arguello asked.

“No. Most divers experience that—nitrogen narcosis is the real name—as euphoria. Some have taken off their masks and tried to talk to fish, others believe they can breathe water. It’s like a five-martini buzz. The Rapture in a cave is like, well, like the worst anxiety attack you can imagine, multiplied tenfold. Just the opposite of euphoric: horrific.”

“It sounds perfectly delightful,” Arguello said. Hallie stared—it was the first time he had tried to say something funny. Defusing fear, she knew, but that was fine—whatever worked.

“To continue about the cave,” she said. “I’m assuming we all know the standard expeditionary caving drill: vertical work, diving, breakdown, squeezes, gas pockets. Right?”

She got the nods she wanted.

“Good. So let’s talk about the major obstacles in Cueva de Luz. First one’s a big wall.”

“What is ‘big’?” Bowman, professionally curious.

“About five hundred feet, lip to pit.” Haight whistled, and even Bowman looked impressed. Cahner and Arguello exchanged worried glances.

“That’s the Washington Monument,” Cahner said.

“Right. Lots more drops of fifty to seventy-five feet each. At least one long flooded tunnel and maybe more, depending on recent rainfall. After that, the usual big-cave nightmares: squeezes, lakes, breakdown, rotten rock, some pockets of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.”

“What provisions for our rescue if something happens?” Arguello asked.

“There are no rescues from deep in a cave like Cueva de Luz.” Bowman, announcing grim news as if it were a weather report. “For one thing, there’s no communication. For another, if you get hurt far down in a cave like that, evacuation is not a possibility. Vertical walls, flooded tunnels and sumps…” He shrugged. “We will be on our own. From start to finish.” Though he was giving them facts that would unsettle most normal people, she found his words, or maybe the way they came across, reassuring, and it appeared the others’ reactions were similar. The power of a natural-born leader, she thought.

Her eyes kept flicking back toward Bowman. Something about the man was pulling her. It wasn’t purely his looks. He struck her as one of the toughest, most intimidating men she’d ever seen up close. Well, all right, it might have a little to do with the way he looked. But there was something else, intangible and ineffable, a pull like two magnets just close enough to generate attraction. And his eyes, his intense, hypervigilant, unwavering eyes, which seemed to be looking out from some great depth.

Which was when she realized the others were all looking at her looking at Bowman. She cleared her throat, continued: “The main thing to understand about Cueva de Luz is that we don’t really understand it. We know more about the moon than about supercaves like this one.”

“Hey, y’all did have some problems down there. Care to enlighten us?” said Haight, leaning back in his chair, hands folded over his belt buckle.

“It’s true,” Hallie said. “We did have some trouble.”

“Like two ol’ boys never came back.”

She swallowed. “Yes.” Who else among these guys would know what happened? Bowman, almost certainly. Al did. And Barnard. And Lathrop would. So it would be news only to Arguello.

“What was it, then? Where they spelunker types or what, Hallie?”

Serious cavers derided casual enthusiasts, called them spelunkers. Cavers rescue spelunkers, went the saying.

“They were good expeditionary cavers.”

“So what happened to ’em, then?”

“We don’t know.”

“Y’all don’t know?”

“We never found them. They were exploring a side passage and never came back. We searched for two full days and nights. No trace.”

Ten minutes later she finished telling her colleagues everything she knew, which really wasn’t much. No one spoke for a moment. Then Arguello did.

“Now I will tell you some more things about Cueva de Luz. Cuicatecs have inhabited that region for a thousand years. The cave is sacred to them. The place from which all life flowed in the Great Beginning. For them, the cave is a living thing. They call its spirit Chi Con Gui-Jao. It is a place of great power.”

“What kind of power?” Cahner asked.

Arguello thought for a moment before responding. “Many kinds. Chi Con Gui-Jao guards the entrance to the underworld. He can take a spirit to La Terra de los Muertos, Land of the Dead. Or send it back to Tierra de la Luz, Land of the Light.”

Cahner started to speak again, but Lathrop went first. “If I may. There will be time for this later, but now we need to focus. Are there any questions?”

Haight’s hand went up. “I have one. I’ve been into some very big caves in my life, and to descend the vertical drops y’all described will take thousands of feet of rope that’ll weigh hundreds of pounds. Too much for a small team to carry. How will we get down and up?”

“That’s my department,” said Bowman. “We won’t be needing rope.”

“Y’all aren’t suggestin’ we BASE-jump the drops, are you? We still have to get back out.”

Arguello grimaced. “I do not know how to do that and have no desire to learn.” Arms folded across his chest, he shook his head slowly back and forth.

“It would take too long to explain now. But we won’t need rope.” Bowman looked at each of them in turn. “Trust me on this one.”

Hallie watched their reactions. The others seemed willing to do that. And so, somewhat to her surprise, was she.

“One last thing,” Lathrop said. “We will have a small special operations team staged near Brownsville. Two-hour response time. But they are only for extraction from the surface, not rescue from the cave.”

“Whoa, there.” Haight held up both hands, like a cop stopping traffic. “I got a few more questions about little things like equipment, food, communications. An expedition like this would normally take months to organize.”

Lathrop was ready. “We don’t have time for ‘normal.’ You saw the pictures of ACE victims. We have, at the very most, ten to twelve days.”

“And those things are taken care of.” Bowman again.

“Righto, then. Any idea how long we’ll be underground?”

“We have planned for seven days,” Bowman said. “Two days to reach the bottom of the cave, one day there to collect material and rest, and three to come back out again. Plus one extra.”

Lathrop looked around. “Thank you for your patience. Any more questions?”

“Just one more.” Haight, hand up. “Really. Then I’ll stop. Earlier y’all said, if I remember aright, we were picked ’cause we could get security clearances and we all had serious cavin’ skills and such.”

“Correct.”

“Y’all also said, ‘and a coupla other things.’ ” He doesn’t miss much, Hallie thought. She remembered the phrasing now, but only after Haight had brought it up. Haight looked from Lathrop to Barnard and back to Lathrop. “I was just wonderin’ about those ‘coupla other things.’ ”

Lathrop and Barnard exchanged glances. Barnard nodded slightly.

Lathrop said, “Well, as a matter of fact, there were some other criteria.”

They waited. He looked at the floor, then back at them.

“You are all unmarried, live alone, and have no children.”

No one spoke. But Hallie thought: In other words, expendables.